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September 29 2009, Camden, Arkansas. 

Twenty one minutes into tomorrow, I cannot impose upon myself the honesty of the actual date.  Here in this comfortable bed on battery power I console myself in the fiction that today is yesterday, perhaps like a vain woman that will not admit her age or lies about it.

So far from God yet so close to the United States, here in Camden I found myself suddenly caught up today in the hilarious cruel snare of my own delimiting boundaries.  How can it be that here in the very bosom of my essence, the home of my mother, I am denied the single thing most vital to my natural existence, an Internet connection?  I simply cannot have it.  She has dial up and my laptop has no modem.  With dial up wireless routers do not work.  I am told that there is no longer such a device as an external modem.  I was unable to buy my way out of my exile even.  And wouldn't you know that the fiber optic cable necessary for DSL has not made it this far down California Avenue, so signing up for broadband and waiting the two days was also outside of my reach.  The only alternative was cable, and that could not be added to her television service before Friday.  I found an unsecured wireless signal a half mile up the road beside a church this afternoon, but when I returned a couple hours later it was secured or turned off.  At the Holiday Inn, my old mainstay for pirating wireless to send in past visits to circumvent  the SMTP security barrier in sending emails I encountered here with my earlier laptop on Mom's dialup, I found that they had secured their signal.  It left me to wandering the streets with my computer riding shotgun, hunting for unsecured signals.  On the news tonight they demonstrated the danger of driving while texting.  That ain't nothing; imagine the dangers of driving while searching for a wireless signal on a portable laptop on battery power through glasses that don't work very well. . .

I worked at quelling my frustration and bought a bottle of wine, paying $13, and it was sufficiently poor that I did not even finish the bottle, and after finishing Garcia-Marquez's final novel, I found this capstone of his career to be sadder than the whores of its title, and I don't mean sad in any noble sense but as an improvised synonym for lame.  What could he have been thinking to pen such pap?

And then I was unable to sleep and find myself in a kind of limbo, a place where I am organic yet out of place, a town that I find myself warming to albeit through a begrudged decadal accommodation yet without the prodigal son's welcome of an abiding grant of Internet access.  It reminds me of the great old dream of having crack cocaine and having all the cocaine sensors turned on in my dream state only to take a big smoke and find that nothing happens. . . WTF?  The other night I had a coke dream in which I was running around scoring from different sources and knowing that I was going off to get high in a bit but far from having those bodily sensors (borrowing Borroughs's phraseology) come on in my dream, just still in the process of scoring, eluding the police at one point like foreshadowing and then stepping out of my car everything done and approaching the door to have a policeman emerge from the same door and walk up to me and ask to see the contents of my pocket.  Not a blue uniformed policeman like the babysitters of Costa Rica, but an officer in a tan uniform, like a devil dog in Mexico . . . but then surely I am getting off track.

Perhaps now after unburdening my frustration I can now sleep, yet I am still tortured in the knowledge that I cannot be complete here, cannot post this nor go on Facebook nor decently interact with my correspondence nor cruise the news nor do anything that makes me content and feel at one with my universe.  Surely it is a hurdle imagined by God himself to force me to reassess and to redraw the lines of my priorities.  Either that or just a product of straying into the sticks to visit my mother.

As if that were not bad enough, my hot water heaters both sprang leaks today.  The glue just cannot hold up to a full day of sun and so the thousand dollar r and d has concluded in a blaze of failure rather than glory.  It has to be done in a metal of some sort.  In a way this is a favorable outcome.  The UV of the sun was going to decay the polyvinyl chloride molecule anyway, and failure was always going to rise within a finite period of time.  Rather than wonder and worry and perhaps find myself struggling with a greater and more costly surprise in facing the obligations of implicit warranties on sold units, now I can simply double down with steel or aluminum or iron or whatever and know that the product will last for decades or forever, whichever may come first.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores, indeed.

September 27 2009, Brodey Bend, Wright, Arkansas

Another splendid day on the river, and today I finished the electrification prospectus for my Hatillo clients and Alex, concluding my pending priority OWW obligations.  From here on out it is all development and expansion, true sabbatical work. 

Whipped up a real artery clogging brunch today, sausage, gravy, fried eggs, and home-made biscuits, and it was sufficiently filling that Dad begged off of any interest in supper, so the kitchen has lain fallow the remainder of the day.  I picked some spearmint and will make some Brodey capresse salad (i.e. with shredded cheddar and spearmint instead of early mozzarella a basil) for myself. 

My inbox has mostly yawned today, and beyond the chore of electrification prospectus I am left somewhat empty, a bit post-partum, inadequately motivated to take on the next thing, too restless to aggressively read, my mind too restless to watch television . . .

Let us celebrate tonight William Safire, pugnacious conservative libertarian, coiner of the term "nattering nabobs of negativism," thorn in the side of the autocracy in Singapore while I lived there, contrarian and pugnacious pit bull, self-anointed lexicographer of the English language, who perished today, claimed by that awful claimant, cancer.

September 26 2009, Brodey Bend, Wright, Arkansas

NIGHT

Surely Of Love and Demons shall inform my prose.  How could it be otherwise?

In this temperate latitude of the northern hemisphere, the light is different and moves slowly throughout the day to whisper of celestial intrigues in susurrant tones and seductive intimations.  Here, unlike the stormy and impatient tropics, to contemplate the sky for changes is a bit like watching the grass grow.  Yet, if you leave it for awhile and return, the evolution is indelible, the spectrum proven in the procession toward the warm colors that paradoxically mark the coolness of rising night.  As the retreating sap of the crops sinks back into the deep rich fertile soil that has sustained the wealth of plantations and tormented the pride of slaves and freed men, the kernel of wealth is left to be plucked not by the calloused hard fingers of the indentured and underpaid but between the plucking grasp of the mechanized progression away from the soil and the water and into a limbo somewhere between steel and air, and still the crickets rub their sturdy legs together in their odd manner of masculine jousting, the females clutching the undersides of desiccating grasses and blushing at the effrontery, tittering amongst themselves, feeling the urge rise to recognize the indelible impulse to obey the calling of their gender to receive.  As the land hushes beneath the crimson and orange brush strokes of a gentle and forgiving autumnal dusk, a chill pervades the air.  It is one not borne on any breeze, for the air stands as still as the crypt, but a rising alabaster coolness very like a shroud settling across the land as if by diffusion, a harbinger of a sickle-bearing horseman due in coming weeks to gallop from the arctic reaches of the continent with pitiless and wanton progress across the continent in order to lay waste to the weak and to test the resolve of the strong with its bitter and merciless ferocity.  And as the crickets seek each other out for a final coupling, their genetic memories deprive them of anything more than a transitory and coded pleasure as life flees their twitching limbs as sure as the dryness pervades the stalks of the lingering un-harvested crops.

Today I finished the pending resource evaluation and cooked a curry dish with steamed asparagus.  I reveled in the day and followed the progress of my staff in the Cradle of Western Civilization.  I enjoyed the disportment of America in its curious Saturday institution of the televised college football game in which both of Dad's teams lost and drank the harvest wine wrung minute by minute from the majestic day, alternating moments of engineering prowess with moments of fervid abandon into the enchanted torment of lyrical machinations revealed in words that cannot be digested more than a few thousand at a sitting at the peril of relinquishing one's self to a tortured orgy of intellectual mayhem and surrender to the honeyed embrace of lunacy.

MORNING

Today we celebrate my mother, whose 70th birthday today is.  Happy birthday, Mom!

After a delightful morning of admiring the brilliant dazzle of the pouring sun, after the girding embrace of temperatures rising lazily from sixty degrees at my lethargic 9:00 a.m. emergence, it is time to go to work and begin my sabbatical duties.  One delicious note:  began Of love and other Demons, Garcia-Marquez's penultimate novel, penned in 1995, and find myself transported back to a colonial era filled with the most realistic magic of all, a prose so dense with flowers and and pustules that the sweet smell of decay rises from the pages like the January whiff of jasmines in a haunted antebellum mansion.

September 25 2009, Brodey Bend, Wright, Arkansas

Not long after nine p.m. on a Friday night, and the tentacles of Morpheus are creeping up my legs, the suckers adhering ever higher to pull me down into the syrrupy realm of blissful sleep.  Not enough energy remaining for a decent journal entry and will be better to start fresh in the morning, doubtlessly.  For pure journalistic discipline, I am nearing my first 24 hours in Arkansas.  The trip yesterday was long but not really tiresome.  I finished my collection of Garcia-Marquez short stories early in the international flight and was thankfully able to sleep for a couple hours, but learned my lesson on the last hour of the flight, that acid hour after dark when restlessness creeps in and the landscape below plods by like a string of slow starbursts spreading below across the land, demarcated by a ribbon of blackness defined by mother ocean.  Don't get on a plane without enough reading material would seem to be the lesson.

Dad was strangely absent as I descended the escalators in Little Rock, the terminal hollow and quiet in its womblike sanctum.  Like a honing beacon I somehow new coming up the jetway that I was on the side of it that would mean I would turn left toward the lobby, and that proved accurate, and walking down the clean and bright but obviously small city concourse my thoughts played hop-scotch among the like airports of the past two decades, the Allentown airport being perhaps the most organically similar to me.  I was reminded of the San Jose (California) airport, Sacramento, Austin.  Even the Charlotte airport had kind of a small-city airport feel, though it probably should be classed up there kind of along the lines of Houston and Philly, Denver and Newark, not perhaps as outrageous as Dallas, Miami, Chicago, or New York.  But he happened along, all white-bearded and bright-eyed before my luggage emerged and recognized the man sitting on a baggage carousel and said in a voice loud enough for him to hear, "why this is our senator," and the man stepped right up and over to us to shake our hands, and Dad introduced me to Senator Mark Pryor, and we had a brief chat, and the man was very decent and receptive and willing, even though it was nearing midnight, and after collecting my bags I returned to shake hands again and to express my appreciation in having met him.  No fluff about votes or any of that stuff, though he would have mine by default.

The sun streams through the basement window at Amherst in a manner that is nearly punitive, and if Japan is the Land of the Rising Sun, then Lynn's basement bedroom is the room of Dawn's spear.  But the house remained free of footfalls among creaking wooden steps until past 8:30, and I draped a cloth across my brow and turned myself back over to the designs of Morpheus, but he would not have me, and when the second set of creaks descended the steps, it was past nine, and I followed suit.  We visited over coffee and slowly laid the plans for a Brodey Bend escape.  I checked for loose wireless signals unsecured but found the neighborhood locked down to virtual interlopers like myself.  We bought a television set and vacuum cleaner at Wal Mart's, checked out a slough of books at the library, had lunch at Subway, shopped extensively at Kroger's and pulled up onto the bucolic lawn at Brodey Bend to the gentle whisper of the willow tree sashaying to the breeze that raised a shimmer across the slow moving water of the mighty river. 

It was very like a homecoming, very like an arrival to a place of which there can be no imitators, no pretenders to the throne.  Once it was Norphlet and then briefly it was Little Rock, then Heber Springs, then Little Rock, then for a couple years I was able to cultivate that bond in Mom's house in Sparkman, but then in a flash that was gone and all the emotional investment wiped out.  It took another six years for the feeling to rise, and it did so here at the river, and it is a nice feeling to be able to enjoy as a respite from the wider walk of the world,  It is nice that Mom's house in Camden has begun to take on a veneer of hominess and pleasant that the town of Camden itself no longer inspires revulsion in me as it has for so many years but a kind of forbearance and perhaps even nostalgic familiarity.  In this stage of my life is the time that I must now forge a kind of home base that my children can find a comfort coming to, even if it is in another country.

As the tentacles rise even higher, I did pretty well for a sappy entry of mostly nostalgic drivel, but the definitive conclusion is a sense of satisfaction at where I am, a contentment at being here and at having the objectives that I have, a sense of fulfillment in having left Puerto Jimenez fairly well-ordered and with open-ended promises for my return, embarked on a great and excellent adventure. 

Tomorrow my sabbatical begins in full form.  For now, I think I shall retire to a cozy bed with a Garcia-Marquez novel and great expectations of a raft of brilliant dreams to people tonight's spectral landscape.

September 23 2009, Crow's Nest, Jimmy

Haliconias	Puerto Jimenez charter lineup	Mogos	Mogos	Mogos

I am in about the middle of my shorts.  I have 86'ed fifteen or so and kept four pair, long pants are next.  Shirts have been dispositioned into various piles.  On the eve of my departure, I am finally going to go through a decade of unworn and outgrown (in the waist line) clothes and thin the ranks.  The missions prior to departure are nearing completion.  A promising property showing this morning and yesterday, perhaps it will convert, perhaps not, but it was a nice day to wander around in the field. 

And the half-size tank is installed and working, and at 8:18 p.m., the water is scalding.  Well, not scalding quite, but too hot to shower in.  It was installed at ten a.m., and the afternoon clouded for good at one, and it is still hot.  And there are no leaks yet.  I may be onto something.  The big boy is to be installed tomorrow.

Bananas	Cacao	Red Berries	Lychees	Pineapple

Later, I have now gone through all my paperwork and packed the PADI application that has been floating around my desk for a year, plus Orpheus diplomas that got left in the rental car in May, as well as the video camera for Aladdin.  Packed my clothes and computer stuff, GPS, altimeter, a little paperwork on the proposals in progress, basically everything.  The duffle bag full of Outback circuit boards is going to draw the full attention of baggage handlers.  An x-ray will send supervisors into a tissy fit.  I will need to warn them up front that it is a suspicious looking bag.. 

50-gallon in prep	25-gallon in progress	50-gallon closer	25-gallon finished	My baby

The water is still hot.  I have written a note of final instructions.  I have only to pick up cash and head to the airport.  Already I am feeling a change in polarity, a kind of mojo rising, a skateboard into a vortex of uncertainty, like a razor blade for a pommel horse and a green flash at sunset.

September 20 2009, The Crow's Nest, James Town

We may pale before our gallivanting ideal, but if we're loving life, it's a check in the win column.  Smith 98, Jones 97.

What this day hath not wrought let God freely claim. 

I am deep into the Pedregosa Resource Evaluation and amazingly penned this morning a comprehensive water supply proposal for Finca Ninfas and followed with an email outline of where we're at on electrification and the steps to follow, the steps I can take.  There have been some uncertainties as this project has walked down the road, and I am not free of being partially at the root of some of these self-same uncertainties, but it is a mythical beast, progress, a giant push-me, pull you, two headed and no-assed.  And finally, pennies in, I am bucked up to the gunwales in millable grain, clipping along at fifteen knots over gentle seas.  I celebrate my staff, the core of which came together at my urging to have a Sunday Funday Cleanup day.  Without it my Thursday Brodey-Bend-sabbatical-bound departure would have remained impossibly rushed.  With the progress of today I am not just hopeful but indeed confident that the post-Pablo-departure Epicenter work program may involve a wheel rolling determinedly down main street, taller than any of the buildings along the block, arrogant in its casual advance, oblivious in its causal effects, me watching it from the safe distance of 2000 miles, as the crow flies. . . .

By the way, back to the drawing board, it looks like the glue may have held after all, and I am fabbing a half unit tomorrow for CafeNet deployment and proceeding with the full 50 gallon unit as well for Juanita's deployment on Wednesday.  What a remarkable capstone would that make, pulling off the solar hot water retro-engineered Osa Industries model.  The Troopster will be proud to learn how I cracked the whip on the cleaning and ordering of his potential temporary quarters.  But I also have a couple of houses on fire sales, one of them maritime in pueblo viejo, an old time original, waiting for its next owner and also the next tsunami.  After all, if you're waiting, might as well wait big.

It is an amazing time to be alive and part of the universe!

September 19 2009, The Crow's Nest, James Town

Mountain Moss Flower	Hydro Man	For Sale	Pablo and Hugo

My foot is sore from kicking so much butt today!

And you know you're an evil bastard when you read the riot act to a girl who has just come from the doctor's office from being told that there is no chance for the baby inside her to survive and is in tears that it is just a question of a couple of weeks before it dies.  Apparently there is no amniotic fluid or very little, nothing that can be done, and in a nation in which abortion is illegal and medicine is too socialized to have some sort of preemptive procedure to abort when nature can be allowed to take its course, it has to be crushing.  I think I would barely be able to stand it if it were me--much less actually come to work--and I tried to get her to just go home and we'd talk about it later, but she insisted.  It seems that a sense of complacency has settled in around all my staff in my progressive absences, and I huddled individually with nearly everyone of them to reiterate what my expectations were.  I am cracking the whip for the next four days, including tomorrow, and we'll get on the other side of this little bump.

Freshly showered, shaved, and anti-shaved, and deodorized and my hair combed, I am a clean machine, and the stickiness has been dispatched from my body to go and reside with other noxious things in the town's sewers.

I arrived to an immaculate nest yesterday but today began its deconstruction, pulling everything out of the storage nook to strew across the room and wave my arms about as to why this or that was there.  It is like I am a repository of refuse.  Any time something does not work and must be replaced, from an ink pen to a keyboard to a computer monitor, rather than throw the junked item out, my staff stores it somewhere in one of my many nooks and crannies so that I am overloaded with junk that is trash and does not work, and I hate that and am in the process of dispositioning all that stuff right to the trash or recycle.

I have decided to clear out the Crow's Nest and make it rental ready to see if we can encourage a little revenue stream while I am gone. 

But there is no time to talk about that or anything else.  I started on the sat yoga report today and must turn to it now.  By tomorrow I need to have the capture tank design and bid completed and off to my client and a good advance on the final hydro report and I am jonesing to reach a state of advanced progress that will allow me on my Thursday travel day to turn exclusively to my sabbatical objective of web development and refinement.

September 18 2009, The Crow's Nest, Porno Jiminey

Hydro Country	A fungus among us	Copete	Spring box

Wish I could post photos, but that will have to wait till tomorrow.  I am borrowing Katiana's camera, and I don't have the necessary cord to download tonight.  But the day was a full one.  I sniffed out the hydro in Pedregosa.  It wasn't too hard.  It was all over the place, spectacular rain forest at around 4000 feet in elevation.

My forensic chemist from Baghdad has gotten assigned to Bogota and will not be able to rent the crow's nest as it was all seeming to perhaps be in the cards.  I am looking more and more like being committed upcoast in Nov-Dec, and am thinking that I should clear my personal stuff out right now and make it ready for nightly /weekly.  If I were traveling I would love to be able to hang here in the nest.  Surely it should be an easy marketing job with CafeNet downstairs.   Kind of a weird idea, but not that bad, finally.

Today's hydro is of the katy bar the door variety, leaving me a bit numb at how to explain that there is a full range of options available, all the way up to 50 kilowatt AC-Direct.

September 17 2009, Villa Bekuo Hotel, Perez Zeledon

Tonight we celebrate the confirmed killing of Noordin Top and pray that al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden make mistakes or fall prey in their zealotry to the impurity of greed or other treacherous motives among one of their inner circle.  It is surely only a matter of time.

Borrowed a collection of Marquez short stories from Tra and started the first story tonight while waiting for my salad at Bazooka's.  It is comfort for the soul to read prose penned by a master.  It practically reads itself, and if it winds up not having a story, even then it would probably be worthwhile.

Running around for the Hatillo investigations today and killing time in Perez.  Am due for the hydro survey tomorrow, to stop in quickly in Dominical, and I need to bonzai to Golfito to pick up the corporate books and all my paperwork, but it seems a bit of a stretch to imagine making that.

A sudden rush of work and unanticipated opportunities have punctuated the last two days, and it is encouraging, despite my approaching departure.  At the same time I am not completely motivated to get after the design, bidding, planning, and reporting that I must mostly complete in advance of my Thursday departure, around my two days of real estate showings and the ambition to go through all my Crow's Nest things to organize papers and get rid of clothes I do not wear.

September 16 2009, Toucan Hotel, Uvita, Costa Rica

The short and the sweet quintessential is the tidal flux of the day.  Better sometimes to not discuss things until after they have happened.  I wonder how many hits I will get from Iraqi IPs in the next 48 hours.  It spawns a brave new wild and woolly concept in my mind for the definitive reality tv experiment.  But not really of course.  But, it could be wonderful skit material.

Remarkable OWW experience as well, sufficiently outstanding to remain beyond my ability to share at this moment.  So, while today will hopefully propel me into a different tax bracket altogether (and why wish small?), better let's not talk about it, and beside that, the weather and majesticity of the mountains and dignity of the forest and all is, after all, a little bit boring.

Should I talk instead about my dinner at the Estonian Adelante Hotel in Ojochal . . . ?  I had capresse salad and pasta pesto primavera and a glass of house red and felt very good about the whole experience, wholesome down even to the testier regions of my particular galaxy.

September 15 2009, Crow's Nest, Port Jim

Today we celebrate Central America's independence from Spain.  It would be nice if it were just Costa Rica and could be properly celebrated as a national treasure, but let's be real.  This country learned of its independence nine days after other people achieved it for them.  There was not a drop of Tico blood spilt in its achievement.  And independence did not much change things for the people that lived here then.  The change did produce a little sibling rivalry between the city-states of Cartago and San Jose, and I am sure those that fell to musket fire would prefer that their lives not be considered lost in vain, but they would be kidding themselves.  The flatlanders won, and the Carthaginians, just as their namesakes a couple millennia earlier, were crushed and the capital of the new nation established in San Jose.

Somebody should probably write a book.

Bought Orpheus's ticket for January.  The round trip airfare was $392 for each, $784 total out of pocket in a time where the slide toward the wintry economic nadir is precipitous and unforgiving.  Just in the nick of time a resource evaluation just landed in my lap, a $1000 hydro survey for a Yoga ashram in the mountains outside of Perez Zeledon.  It is a property that I did a verbal report on the cheap for for the previous occupants.  Upon selling, they mentioned me and my work, even though I never got a call back from those people after walking their river and reporting that they had hydro potential.  I was a bit surprised a couple weeks ago with the call out of the blue asking me about that work and about the possibility of putting together a proposal, and now here I am, scheduled to drive up to Perez on Thursday and to do the work on Friday morning. 

It will cover the boys' tickets and leave me $100 in cash after expenses, and who knows, maybe it will turn into a $40,000 December hydro installation.

The hot water heater is not going to work in plastic.  The glue simply does not hold up to the heat.  I am going to have to shelve the plastic, suck up the $600 in capital investment so far to learn this and probably scale back the R and D until my return when I can oversee one done in steel.  Boy, is it ever going to be heavy!  I sure do need the right material at the right price.

For now, I have only to get the afternoon's Juanita's work underway and then to pack a bag and head out under the gathering clouds, the Ruby's bowsprit pointed toward Uvita.  Quick meeting of the minds tomorrow onsite with Copete and Alex, then bonzai back passing through Golfito to pick up legal documents from attorney, overnight in Jiminy then another high speed run up the highway to Perez to knock out the Ashram job

September 14 2009, Crow's Nest, Port Jim

Where have all the drummers gone?

For the past three weeks I have been wondering that.  There has been no daily drum practice in preparation for tomorrow's Independence Day celebrations, and I have marveled at the eerie quiet.  For nine years the thirty days leading up to the 15th of September have been punctuated by the sonic disturbance of fifty or so drummers banging out a beat in the elementary school a couple lots over from the Crow's Nest.  For nine years it has been as predictable as rain on the night before.  Tonight they will have the Farol procession, but there is no rain, and tomorrow there will be no parade.  Last year's parade had one group of post high school kids in a float doing a dance with tambourines on the back of a flatbed, and I remember thinking at the time that the sheerness of their costumes seemed out of place.  You could see the women's underwear through the sheer fabric, and they were all wearing thongs.  Well, turns out that complaints were filed, and the federal government interceded to prohibit Puerto Jimenez from celebrating with a parade for a period of THREE years.  I won't be missing the drummers but the annual parade was quite a spectacle, and the town will surely be a bit sadder for not being able to have it.  Turns out I have a picture of the offending group from this very blog from one year ago and past the single picture I have for the amusement of the ikhanosphere gazers.

Managed to get the pieces missing and get the hot water heater back underway and expect to finish and get it under trials tomorrow afternoon.  It appears that I am to be stood up for a second day in a row by my real estate client and am a bit pleased to be free of all of the associated drama.  Made some adjustments in Juanita's to scale back on hours and try to save a buck or two, and tomorrow marks the start of the two month period of deepest winter.  Am off to Uvita in the afternoon to spend the night, meeting on Wednesday morning at the job site with that intake completing Wed afternoon to plan the tank.  And at Verdemar, the chlorination system and rainfall capture is all working like a charm.

I am drawing nearer and nearer to a scheduled escape on the 24th of September.

Almost forgot:  I bought Aladdin's ticket today.  Coming down on January 4 and returning on January 18, coming accompanied by his Whalehammer colleagues and Orpheus will be coming as well with Sonya it appears.

September 13 2009, Crow's Nest, Port Jim

21:30

Tonight we celebrate market forces.

It is after all the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which could be argued to have been the christening of the current global recession.

Here in the Crow's Nest, we gird ourselves against a tendency toward sour grapes, or far worse, a proclivity for the anticipation of sour grapes and its pre-emption by frank talking.  From the cutting-off-the-nose-to-spite-the-face division.  Dude, I keep telling myself, you are a long-haul player.  Get out of the short-haul mindset.  And remember that even the short haul has not reached its destination. 

Eric Lindquist's band is named Vulture Realty, an arguably odd name for a hip New York duo.  Yet vulture realty is a perfect descriptor of the nature of the local industry here in these distressed times when a real buyer appears in town, fresh off the boat, starry-eyed, and with more money than sense.  It brings out the bottom feeders to grow teeth and venture up into blue water to actually hunt.  Being just in it for the money is one thing.  The tactics my vulpine colleagues employ as routine parry-and-thrust is legerdemain among even the Machiavelli wing of the global industry, I suspect, darlings of the smugly corrupt, though in dizzying circles, we are probably viewed more like the zombies of the trade, mindlessly waving our arms in front of us, prowling turf. 

I was presented yesterday with the options to pursue a probable pay day through a minefield of dubious ethical compromises and declined to intermediate on ethical grounds.  The decision, while all noble and dignified, puts the ball in the court of beak-smackers sitting alongside of me on that line watching that dying thing in the road flop around still, enfeebled, but not yet fully dead.  My dissent may have been the domino that caused the whole thing to blow up--or maybe that was just the way it was explained to me as a sidelining maneuver, and perhaps the client's retreat in annoyance is a ploy, though I think not.  Nevertheless, it may have cost me the payday on a legitimate deal, thought that is all just a perhaps, and I guess you just have to make your best calls and do so unemotionally and let the chips fall where they may and never hold a grudge.

Perhaps they are not even market forces at all, and perhaps my temptation is to read into something that may not be there rather than to actually make sense of the tea leaves.  Anyway, who can possibly anticipate the fickle hand of fate and the undeclared intentions of the future, even the very near future?  In the absence of any certainty and the disqualifying indignity of actually asking, there is a third way, and that is to simply surrender the emotion invested and learn to turn my mind to the next item on the agenda and walk away without any bad feelings, snide remarks, or anything that would disqualify me from a future continuance should I choose one.  While perhaps implicit and obvious to most people is only now becoming a prime building block of reality to me now.  Ability, capacity, discipline, talent, drive, ambition, and the ability to finish are all nice traits and bode well probably for your average joe, but absent interpersonal skills and political acumen, those talents are like a drawer full of expensive high quality knives that have not yet been sharpened.

I am practicing it as an exercise, the restraint from unearned commentary, the release into the wind of any tendency toward a personal stake in dips in interpersonal fortunes or relations.  Of course, this forum reveals my own hypocrisy, but at least here, it is not explicit and will probably not be read by the actors that are the inspiration for the thoughts.  But beyond the restraint from reacting, there is the obvious benefit of allowing a rolling ball to at least remain on the table.  Time and space are not kind to constancy in this region's natives and ex-patriots, perhaps to no one, and it is small.  And I cannot enshrine myself as an integral pillar of the local commerce and regional personality network by butting heads with others over silly things and getting stubborn just because I may be right about something.  Most people probably know these things intrinsically, yet for me it is an exercise to remind myself of what does not feel natural to me.

I am reminded of the sociopath that, lacking the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, looks around to inform herself through the actions and values of others to guide her camouflage to remain under an umbrella of perceived normalcy.

09:30

Sunday morning streams down with gentle tranquility upon the bustling little tropical backwater of Puerto Jimenez!  I simply love Sundays and the luxury of rising slowly and taking things at a pace unpressured by extraneous demands.  Sunday might as well be like any other for me, but at least I allow myself the mental liberty of it being like a real Sunday at least for the first few hours.  Perhaps upon my return I will inaugurate a Sunday brunch and feature eggs benedict and belgian waffles so that I can conclude my Sunday morning commune in front of a steaming plate of delicious things covered with hollandaise sauce.

I have a client flying in today.  She has been broker shopping in town and has spoken to four of us, and it is beginning to grow uncomfortable.  I feel like those mentally challenged inmates in that school in Texas being forced to fight one another by their sadistic care providers.  This client surely does not know that she is stoking the coals and fanning flames that need not be fanned, and as I thought about this, I came up with another colorful analogy.  I am beginning to feel a bit like a gaunt vulture sitting on a line looking out on the road waiting for the flopping thing there to die, my fellow vultures lined up beside me, all of us smacking our beaks with anticipation.  After studying this feeling over a fair bit last night, I decided that I did not get into this business to have those sorts of feelings.  Still, you don't want to lay down a gauntlet or make any sort of declaration that could close the door that while remaining open could lead into a momentary garden.

I had a funny interaction the other day with a self-centered young man at the  Toucan Hotel.  We got to talking after sitting around the horseshoe bar clacking on our respective computers, and when he examined the card he solicited and saw that on the back side of the OWW side was my realty side, he pointed out that he did not like real estate people because they were just out to destroy nature and did not care about anything but themselves, something to that effect.

And I quickly put his mind to rest about me, showing him that I was not like that at all.  "I am only in it for the money," I told him proudly.  He didn't know quite what to make of that.  Perhaps he wondered if I had not made his own point for him, but what the hell do I care what an arrogant young surfer things about realtors. 

I am scheduled to have dinner with my client tonight, and have Marijana back in town tonight, and tomorrow a scheduled trip to Golfito to recover legal documents from the lawyer that I am no longer working with.  I have five days to put something together for the client flying in tonight, but she wants what is not available, so I think that will prove a disappointment for her, and I have already dismissed any expectations and decided not to beat myself over the head with her and to let the others fight over her patronage and to focus on the hot water heaters, buttoning up local affairs, a quick return to the Hatillo job site, and winding down my turn in Paradise to contemplate the big bird waiting to convey me to the distant kingdom of Arkansas.

Who or what can we celebrate today?  I will be thinking on that and will surely fill you in when I doubtlessly cannot resist a concluding entry tonight sometime.

September 11 2009, Mango J. Hotel, Hatillo

First, a shout out to America!  On this eighth anniversary the candle of American liberty burns the brightest of all.  Perhaps by the tenth anniversary I will feel qualified to opine in print about the events of this day.  For now the ground is still too hallowed, the complex soup of trade-offs far from settled reality, the nation's nerve-endings not recovered enough for viewing of the day's light through the prism of nuance.  But we celebrate today the things that make the country great but not at the expense of forgetting the things that need improvement. 

Now, back to the cozy confines of navel-central. . .

Last night's entry suggests that wine consumption and sentence length are directly proportional.  We'll keep it short tonight.

I talked tonight's hotel room down to $40, and it is really nice and roomy, nobody else here, king sized bed, AC, sky television, hot water, huge balcony with Pacific view.  But no in room Internet.  Dominical, fifteen kilometers or so away, is arguably too far to wander out after dark on sketchy roads for an experimentation in cuisine, but I will do it nevertheless and may happen upon a wireless connection and will at least get this post prepared.

Today's scheduled meeting and field work went forward according to plans, and I head back up in the morning for a final huddle on the spring box design, then back to Jiminy.  In the meantime I have had a bit of motion by a client that may turn into a purchase option next week in town, pretty exciting stuff for the typically slow September.  And back on Tuesday to Hatillo for a meeting on site with the Project Super to get Luis lined out on the actual tank. 

It is terrible not having a camera.  My plan is to wait and pick one up in the States, but I should have simply replaced it as soon as it went south.  You can't take a picture if you don't have a camera that works.  And there's always stuff to take pictures of.  Now that I have re-calibrated myself from my formerly photophobic to my current photophyllic nature, a camera is something that I have to always have and have handy.

September 10 2009, Hotel Tucan, Uvita

Tonight we celebrate Jennifer D'Angelo and take inspiration from her walk and look askance at the numbers game rolling in the background and prostrate ourselves before the shining whole of willful sentience.  Jen descended from the mountains where she was hired to work back in 2006 with some crazy land-holding group that fell apart soon after.  I was hired to do the hydro assessment, and that's how we met.  She was hooked up with a sketchy swarthy latin from town then, firmly hooked up, to a subterranean bad boy now hooked up with a Juanita's ex-bartender.  When Jen decided to make a change but was not ready to dutifully return to the States as she may have been expected to do by her former employers, she came and worked for a pittance with me at CafeNet, and she is the programming genius behind the linkage of the web site to the backend Access database of my own design that is my most potent marketing tool, and www.osapenrealty.com is a product of Jen's protean elbow grease, and tonight as I have explored an anastomosing subplot of a realty story underway, our celebration is certainly not without cosmic coincidence.  She also single-handedly did www.alfaromeoair.com.  Both of these sites continue to make me money.  She also undertook the initial marketing face-time schmooze of a real estate client that through an eight month series of evolving negotiations resulted in my second sale.  She will be happy to know that he is Juanita's former regular, now occasional big spender and nearly a brother in law to Paul Clift, who for whatever the divergent tides of history has implied, will still always have a resident position in my personal pantheon.  It was a sad day for me you can be sure when she announced it was time to go.  Something soured between her and her boyfriend at the time, and free spirits cannot be discouraged from the exercise of their freedoms, as I am aware from being personally acquainted with myself.  So, I was happy to be happy for the transcendental and huge mile marker that she tallied with the publication of the new and improved Osa Pen Realty web site, and choked my regrets with well-wishes, and watched her disappear back into the wider world.  I guess she made some calibrations to the model or something, because she hooked up and then married a different and presumably better guy, and I had a brief email correspondence with her by that means back then, a couple years ago, perhaps, enough to learn that she was headed off to marry a Turk and to live in Istanbul, no less. 

The Osa is a magnet for remarkable people along the many-splendored spectra of remarkable-ness.  It is true that we are all either wanted or unwanted back home, but beneath the tongue-in-cheek is the double meaning of "wanted," and some of us, present company possibly excluded, are wanted on the front beat of the meaning of the word back in the places within our cultural backdrop we formerly haunted.  Others are wanted on the backbeat of the meaning.  Myself, I think I fall more in the unwanted category altogether.  But that is another story, and tonight we are celebrating and honoring Jen, not me. 

The pink ribbon email was like a cartoon sledge-hammer to my chest in slow motion.  It was not the standard pink ribbon logo but close enough to immediately make connections, and then the textual blurbs and link that make the connection explicit.  Still, I refused the temptation to draw conclusions and wrote her and asked about Facebook, and we friended, and tonight I read from March on her blog and am learning enough about written communication that it leaves me humbled. 

Here in Uvita, I tip my cabernet in the general direction of Florida and dedicate this evening to Jen and Celal. 

For those of you that have not done so and are curious, Facebook is an amazing personal tool.  It is like a love proportionate to your own, perhaps the embodiment of that old Lennon conundrum-ditty that "the love you take is equal to the love you make," and Facebook is just as stand-offish as you are.  But not more.  There is a quid pro quo programmed into its substance, but the sentience inside is not malevolent but strangely opposite.  Even old fogies may find it a bit eerily transcendental.  People with the initials DCT also may find the forum worthy, but it doesn't filet itself.  You have to touch the fish and sharpen the knife and dispose properly of the cold entrails.  It is not for the lazy, not even the self-indulgent.

September 9 2009, Hotel Verdemar, Manuel Antonio

By the way, that picture is my buddy Mike Hennessey, right, with a 1245 pound black marlin that he caught off Hawaii.  That's some Photoshop job, isn't it? 

Got started late and finished early here at Verdemar.  A few minor adjustments and now the rainfall capture water is passing through the chlorinator and the broken quartz sleeve in the UV disinfection unit is replaced.  We even got a rain this afternoon and were able to successfully test it, and I can even smell chlorine in the tank.  The boys headed back up to Jaco where Copete's wife is living and will be meeting me at ten a.m. tomorrow in Hatillo.  The permit consultant arrives Friday.  I figure I will probably head back to the Osa on Saturday afternoon.  Hopefully in time to see two solar hot water heaters installed and working, one for CafeNet one for Juanitas.  And if that pans, then hopefully I can be off to the races.

Bought my Natureair ticket today for the 24th, 9:30 a.m., so I am all ticketed up from Jimmy to Little Rock.

Also, completed my print advertising for Digits phone book, as threatened last night.  Just got on a roll this morning and finished them.  Here are the three ads.  They are four really, but the OWW and Osa Power I combined to form a single half page color ad.  Be aware that the originals are at high resolution and not fuzzy like these below.  I have exported them from Adobe Illustrator to j-pegs, and let the resolution at its defaults.  It's easier on everybody's bandwidth this way.

A little shout out to Orpheus and my thanks for the help with the software.  While I do not like Dreamweaver and was not very happy with another graphics package that came in the suite, Adobe Illustrator is wonderful, every bit as intuitive and robust as CorelDraw, and I have made the transition.  It is my new all around graphics package!

September 8 2009, Hotel Verdemar, Manuel Antonio

The light of day did not dispel the gloom of hardware challenges.  But it did settle across the morning in its customary pleasantness and made things seem less traumatic.  So, I guess it did dispel the gloom a bit.  But there was no time for mulling things over.  Marijana showed up at eight, and we drank coffee and were at the bank by 8:20, and by 8:40 we were out of there, and she had her a new corporate account with nothing more than a signature.  I had gathered all the paperwork and gotten the ball rolling the day before, and I was surprised and pleased at the brutal efficiency.  We convened at 9:30 and sat in the foyer with other waiting people for 20 minutes before being ushered into the inner sanctum, and within 45 minutes the contract was emitted, read, signed, and cash money handed over, and the option was done, and everybody was happy.

I sent Lalo off with the new owner to walk the fences and help him to get his utilities in order and figure out what he was going to need to fix things up, and I packed my bags and hit the road.  I am at the hotel now, the crew arrives tomorrow, and we do a little adaptation here, minor bit of work, spend the night, then down to Hatillo for a spring box and on Friday, my geologist colleague arrives, and we get the field work done for the water concession application. 

Figured this down time would be inspirational to work but it is not.  Got my Osa Power ad finished, and will show tomorrow, and tomorrow is my deadline for all the print advertising.  I have two more ads to do tomorrow and then revise the ones going into the 2010 commercial and official telephone directories.  My idea is to ride the horse to redo the ads I have running on www.amcostarica.com, but the real commitment is to beef up the web sites in time for all the new viewers headed my way and to do a new round of web promotion to position the sites.  It is terrible drudgery, but very important.  I have proven to myself time and again that advertising works, and with a little bit of capital, it is time to invest a bit in the future.

But all I really want to do is read and write fiction.  Sssh, don't tell anybody!  For the record, I did finish my collection of Gilchrist short stories.

September 7 2009

The humor does not elude me.  But an intellectual recognition of something as humorous is not enough to make me laugh.  There is an alarm going off in the distance.  It has been doing so since I returned to the Crow's Nest.  It will surely continue all night long.

After the all night power outage and 36 hours without Internet and the change-out of the air conditioning downstairs, you would think that I was due for a little bit of stability.  And I did my work well today, followed up with all the people I needed to follow up with, touching base with the buyer and seller and lawyer.  I picked the owner up at the airport, caught up with her over a coke at Juanita's and got her to her hotel and got my truck back from the mechanic pronounced ready to travel and made it over to the shop to follow along with round two of the water heater.  And I came back and worked well and good on the print advertising for Osa Power until Marijana showed up at seven fifteen and we went out for dinner.  It rained in the afternoon, and the streets were slick as we walked over to Il Giardino, but it had quit raining.  Just before our dinner was served came a single bolt of lightning very close, scared me, made blue light.  I commented to her that I was surprised the power had not gone out.  We ate dinner, and it rained very hard for about five minutes at one point and then cleared off again, and I walked her back to her hotel and returned to the Crow's Nest, noticing an alarm--like a car alarm--going off about four three away, annoying but far enough away it is not unbearable.

Sitting down at the computer, my mouse does not work, and upon inspection I see that I have no network, and it shows none, and so I reboot my notebook, but it is still the same, no network, no mouse, so I decide to try to connect by wireless and go to call downstairs to get the password.  But there is no dial tone in my main office number.  So I try my second line, the Osa Power number.  Same.  No dial tone.  So I try my cell.  Call failed, Network busy.  So, I finally march down the stairs and into the Internet, and Maribel asks if I have Internet, and I get that sick little feeling in my stomach and learn that four of the computers get Internet, five of the computers do not get Internet, and the laptop will not even come on.  Plus there is no dial tone in any of the phones.

Back upstairs I am able to connect and have wireless Internet, though at first nothing comes up on either of my browsers, neither IE or Chrome.  But my email works, and messenger, and neither the external keyboard nor the external mouse work, and a warning box keeps flashing on the screen announcing that there has been a failure in one of the USB devices, and after disconnecting both and discovering that happily the onboard keypad and mouse both work, the warning box keeps flashing back on.

I dodged a bullet in not losing this whole notebook, including 100 pages of recently composed fiction, and so whatever the damages are downstairs, they are infinitesimally smaller than they could be, and it reminds me of how dependent I am on this machine and how incautious I have been about not making regular backups. 

Maybe you are not seeing the humor yet, so let me continue.  Lately I have been buying lightning arrestors and installing them for my clients.  Many of my clients have had problems with lightning strikes this year.  I sell these units for $185 and have eight of them on order right now for delivery to Miami to come down with the next shipment.  Just as I chastised myself two days ago for not having set myself up at this advanced stage with battery backup to overcome the detours in life caused by prolonged power outages, a much less costly surge protection system may very well have obviated the damages suffered tonight, whatever they wind up being. 

So much to process in a single week's time.  I need to work harder and earn more money and outfit myself with all the cool gadgets to insulate myself better and as intrinsic marketing.  Maybe I should get some batteries and an inverter on this next shipment.  Five grand.  I have the money . . .

It is clear that this alarm is going to grow tiresome.  It has been going off since the lightning strike.  Why doesn't somebody go and shoot it.

September 6 2009

Okay, this scene is close enough to tease you with it.

The Funeral of Johnny Mendoza

“Too bad he’s not here to see this,” Rupert said, leaning into Torino to keep his comments private.

“He’d keel over dead to see the size of this crowd,” Torino replied gravely.  “Poor bastard.”

 “I once had a dog that died from distemper,” Rupert recalled.  “And Daddy and I buried it in the backyard.  And that’s what it feels like now, like Johnny’s getting buried in the back yard.”

 “Yeah, I don’t know about this talk about a Dos Brazos cemetery,” Torino agreed.  “There’s something ain’t right about it.”

“I suppose looking at it realistically,” Rupert reasoned, “all cemeteries have to start with a first burial, right?”

“Maybe so, but it’s still kind of morbid.  Like a portent.”

“I don’t much like it either.”

“At least we have a priest now,” Torino rationalized.  “I could go for Mass now and again.”

“Not every week of course,” Rupert clarified.

“It’s just nice to know it’s there if you need it,” Torino agreed.

“It’d be kind of rough to be up here if we didn’t know there was a bar down by the river where we can go and buy ourselves a drink if we were to want one.”

“You gotta have both sides of the street,” Torino philosophized, “to make a town.  Maybe this cemetery business is the right thing after all.  Maybe Dos Brazos will really take off, after the gold rush.”

“You think?  It is kind of nice here.”

“I like it, personally.  I’d live here, even without the gold.”

“What would you do?”

“I don’t know,” Torino thought about it.  “Maybe open a little pulpería and sell coffee and sugar and things. . . you always gotta have coffee and sugar and things.”

“Who would you sell the coffee and sugar and things to if there was no miners?”

“I don’t know,” Torino replied, a bit annoyed.  “To the other folks that decided to live here also, I guess.”

“It’s still kind of weird,” Rupert reminded him, looking back toward where the casket was poised on saw horses with a colored cloth draped over it.

“I sure wouldn’t want to be a cemetery’s founding corpse,” Torino agreed.  “It don’t seem right.”

 

Gato Mazantas put on his public face as he strolled up to the milling throng of workers.  It was hard to make sense of what he was seeing, something that in itself was not uncommon in his line of work, and in times of uncertainty, it was always best to smile and act like everything was natural.  It reminded him of sitting beside Enrique Carmona last month, shooting the shit in a La Gamba dirt-floored bar waiting for product and having them slip up behind the two of them and garrote Carmona right there in front of God and everyone as a Canoas cartel turncoat.  It was all over as quick as that and a bit unsettling to look down on the bulging eyes and protruding tongue of his former buddy, the newly dead man sprawled out on the floor, as surprised in death as he was in life to feel the icy hot wire slip quickly over his head to squeeze the life out of him and how nobody said much and how some kept on drinking and how the wife of the bar owner walked past and spat upon the face of the corpse.  In moments like those it seemed best to act like you knew all along what was happening and what to expect, like it was no surprise, or else, who knows, it might happen to you next.  And so as he walked up into the crowd of hundreds of cleaned up miners mumbling amongst themselves and standing around gravely, the smell of cheap cologne thick in the air, he smiled and touched his forehead and shook hands and acted like it was the Saturday social he had expected all along. 

Many looked at him with eyes that said they wanted to score but most were thankfully hesitant to speak up in public, and Mazantas gentled those that did with promises to meet one half kilometer up the road from the cantina a half hour before dark, fifty meters into the forest along the camp’s water line to take care of them—and to spread the word—and his customers smiled and returned to their polite small talk and their simulation of mourning.  He made it to the head of the line where he could finally see what was going on and despite the distaste he had for the idea of planting one of his most regular reefer customers, Johnny Mendoza, out in the back of the camp like this rather than hauling him into town for a proper burial at the Puerto Jimenez graveyard, he had to admit that they had done this up tastefully.  There was a large plot that was roped off with two-by-fours driven into the ground and big enough for perhaps fifty or more graves, with wood piled to the side, like the company was going to make a little picket fence around it.  Gato imagined them painting it white and it all being very fine and well and natural and dignified for all practical purposes and appearances.  The grass inside the perimeter of the roped off yard was neatly trimmed and cut low to the ground, and the gathering throngs hovered in front of this in their uncertainty about whether it was correct and proper to enter the trimmed plot of grass or not.  Gato assumed that the intention was for people to crowd onto the grass and not stand outside where they were mulling around between the river bushes of the floodplain, but he would allow a greater authority to make that call.  There was a hole in the ground, about in the center of the plot, and the mound of soil and alluvium was piled to the right, and he imagined that every man present had already wondered what the grade was of the excavated material, which was, after all, having never been mined, virgin ore.  He could not see a backhoe anywhere around but was certain that the grave had been dug with one and hoped for dignity’s sake that it would be filled in by shovel.  Perhaps next year this whole edge of the valley would all be flipped and run through the wash plants, but the idea filled him with distaste even though it was none of his business and he should not care about such things.  To the left hand side of the hole the casket appeared to be poised on sawhorses.  A colored fabric was draped over the top and fell to the ground around its edges and moved gently in the breeze.  To the left side, ten meters away, the Priest was standing in conference with Klondike Sutter and Radcliff Finke, and as the priest strolled over to the hole, a Holy Bible pinioned under his left arm, his black robe billowing in the afternoon breeze, Gato’s blood ran cold, and he searched out Finke’s face to draw his attention.  The priest waved for the men to draw near.  “Gather round,” he called out with a voice that projected resonantly and with indisputable authority.

Gato allowed the men around him to surge past, and he moved forward but more slowly so that as the mass of men convened closer to the service about to get underway, Gato was in the back portion of the crowd.  Without realizing it, Finke was suddenly beside him, and the handoff was made and the knife was in Gato’s pocket in the space of an exchange of greetings, Finke moving around the periphery to continue urging the men to move forward and pack together closer to be able to hear, clearly at ease with running herd and attending to officious tasks of no merit.  Mazantas looked up to find Klondike Sutter staring at him from where the latter stood off to the edge, ringside to the service along with the other bosses.  Gato touched his forehead and managed a thin brief smile across the vast gulf separating the two men, but Sutter did not smile in return and rested his hand on the pistol holstered to his belt and did not quit watching him, and Mazantas grew warm and agitated under the foreigner’s rude stare and wondered where he had gone wrong with this man.

“My dear friends and fellow aggrieved,” Father Sergio Santabria began the service, his voice a lasso that drew the gathering to him.  “We are gathered this afternoon to honor Johnny Mendoza and to extol his short and extraordinary life as we beseech our Father penitently and with personal abasement to open the gates of heaven to welcome this noble operator of heavy equipment, native son of San Vito, fallen in the prime of his life so far from his Talamancan birthplace, here among those that he chose as his brethren in this sacred valley of God where the riches of the ground are exceeded only by this community’s love for the Lord and obedience to His law.  As we pay homage to Johnny,” Santabria continued, his tone fluctuating like sets of waves striking a beach, building and falling to reach some inevitable crescendo in itself a continuance, “as we celebrate his life and mourn his passage, we turn to one another and are reminded that the only guarantees in this life begin after it’s over, when the pious and good are able to gaze longingly upon an eternal reward. . . “

“What a bunch of horseshit,” Finke muttered to Sutter, having returned from his rounds to stand by the boss’s side.

“It’s all what you make of it,” Sutter pointed out, noting that Rupert in the front row and a few others of the men had tears rolling down their cheeks.

“Quite a turnout, I must concede,” Finke allowed, after listening respectfully a while.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” the Priest declared in a tone that signaled a new movement in his eulogy.  “I shall not want.”

 “What’s that drug dealer doing here?”

“Probably curiosity,” Finke shrugged.  “This is the biggest thing that’s happened in Dos Brazos since the company came to town.”

 “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.  He leadeth me beside the still waters.”

 “What did he have to say to you,” Sutter asked.  “I noticed you exchanged words.”

“Just that it was too bad about Mendoza, and that it was decent of the company to go to the trouble.”

“He restoreth my soul.  He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness in His name’s sake.”

 “It seems odd that he would come here,” Sutter insisted.

“Probably mourning the loss of a customer,” Finke guessed.

“Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .” the priest’s voice rose, its inflection guided toward an imminent climax.

“I shall fear no evil,” Sutter said.

“Thy rod and thy staff,” the priest boomed.  “They comfort me.”

“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,” Sutter anticipated the next words.

“Thou anointest my head with oil,” continued the priest.  “My cup runneth over.”

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me in all the days of my life,” said Sutter.

“And Johnny Mendoza shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” the priest concluded. 

A long pause ensued and all the men stood still, and the only thing moving was the shroud that covered the casket, which rustled in the afternoon breeze.

“Amen,” declared the priest.

A torrent of “amen” rose from the swell of the men gathered.  “Amen,” agreed Gato Mazantas.  “Amen,” murmured Klondike Sutter.  “Amen,” repeated the young atheist, Radcliff Finke.

“Amen,” said the Gold Walker who had walked up in the middle of the service and stood at the very back of the assembled crowd.  He had learned upriver about the accident but had not imagined that he would walk onto funeral services, right here in Dos Brazos for mercy’s sake.  He had known Mendoza pretty much since he had stepped off the launch four years ago, fleeing some silly misdemeanor or another across the gulf or child support or something like that that he never talked about.  Tojanescu was philosophical about it and figured if it was your time, it was your time, and there was no sense getting emotional.  It was like the seasons and like the planet.  There was rain and sun and life and death and sea and earth and air and water and gold and ashes.  You had to take care of yourself in this world, and if you quit doing that long enough to get yourself killed, what sense did it make for those that lived on to dwell on it?  As far as he was concerned, funerals were a celebration for all those in attendance that someone else had died and not them.

I put my right foot in, take  my right foot out, put my right foot in, then I shake it all about.

Here in the afterglow of a weekend of tortured revelations, a dreamscape of lollipops and sucking chest wounds, a barren plain of verdant plenty, where the sky won't shine and the sun won't rain and everything is painfully relative, I am thirteen pages into Day Five and plodding forward mechanically toward a conclusion of a first draft, aching for the chance to return with a critical eye and weed the chaff and gnaw on the grain, chew the cud and let it ferment in a bowl to see what kind of mash it will yield.

For those to whom that does not sound appetizing, try this out.  I have on one pound of black beans boiling away right now, have been for the past forty-five minutes, and I just tossed in a pound of pork beefsteak (whatever the heck that is) and three Panamanian hot peppers and the butt ends of three cilantro stalks, the latter just to get the smell in the air, the rest of it waiting for the final five minutes, since you can never add in this spice too late in the cooking.  And I finally hit on the wine.  It is Trapiche, Argentinian, cabernet sauvignon, 2007, $12 a bottle, and it is superb.  I wish that I had the vocabulary to describe it, but I only know it when I like it, not how to say why.  Anyway, I have a clump of celery all cut up, two carrots, two bulbs of garlic, three clumps of cilantro, a single whole onion, and tonight's black bean and pork soup will want only for steaming corn bread served up piping hot with butter and honey from a cast iron skillet to round out a balanced whole.  But when you are just one person, it does not pay to get carried away in the kitchen, either in the volume of any one thing, or in the number of a variety of things, because without assistance it becomes leftovers, and they can stretch too long into the week.  I do think I settled on something last week however, when I made two delicious things on consecutive nights and got to switch in the next few days between these two leftover items rather than have to continue whittling day in and out on a single one.  It was really quite civilized, and every time I had one or the other it was as if arriving fresh to something wholly wonderful if not altogether new.

It is once again This Side of Paradise time of the year:  September, and back to school time, perhaps sporting a hint of autumn in New England, still torpid and oppressive in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Embayment where even poor white trash can escape the hardscrabble reality of not being born into a farming family by choosing to read.  There was an acute year, 1986, when Nina swelled with Orpheus and grew dismissive of her new marriage that I explored the dull faces of the Grey Metropolis and the bright shining mischievous ones of the rich kids in the Catholic High School in its suburbs where I taught math and physics to find the meaning of what I was going through without having any idea what it was.  And in the absence of any anchor to tether my ship to a buoyant and hopeful harbor, I just let myself drift above it all and to watch and to take it all in and be moved as destiny had me be moved and suffered the ostracism at home, the insufferable reproach of a woman tiring of the toy she had picked out all wrong at the toy store and had used up too much to be able to take back and get a full refund.

But no matter how bad someone seeks to make it for you, no matter how intently you blind yourself to the pure piggish vulgarity of dishonesty and manipulation, in the end, nobody can wash away the colors that come to adorn the trees in the park and along the streets, and no single person--even in a home where television is frowned upon--can strip the fall of the feel of football helmets clashing and television commentators extolling the virtues of the soldiery arrayed in mock battles like gladiators before Roman royalty in the amphitheaters of colleges around the nation.  And after a sweaty, hot, oppressive duel all summer long with the fierce orb in the sky, no misery at home can strip away the welcome chill in the air, the jousting gusts of wind that presage a creeping winter and its attendant blankets of purity fallen from the skies.  And nobody can take away from anybody else that person's first reading of Catcher in the Rye.  And twenty-two years later after the passage of storms worthy of the Edmond Fitzgerald's bane, the Fall of 1986 returns to me in those novels that graced that period, This Side, Catcher, A Separate Peace, and while The World According to Garp I read earlier, it too somehow joins the pantheon of the fall novel, the back-to-school, dawn of life in the twilight-of-the-year kind of way.

Tonight we celebrate September, for it is not like other months--and not at all an appropriate month for a great national monumental day like September 11th at all--and we are now fully wrapped up into it, even if the leaves in Paradise never turn golden crimson kaleidoscope wonderful, even if the temperature never dips beneath eighty-five degrees, and even if the fifty yard line is a maritime zoning construct rather than the perfect seat on a crisp beautiful day with a blue so deep above as to make even fallen Catholics genuflect and even card-carrying atheists doubt for a moment the emptiness of their impotent convictions.. 

September 5 2009

At 10:00 a.m. the Internet is now back up, finally, and I now have 36 hours worth of accumulated emails to reply to.  It is a feeling a bit like spending the morning in a drunk tank waiting for them to get around to releasing you, and finally, having the door opened and getting your billfold returned and stepping out of the air conditioned precinct station-house onto a hot sunny morning in which everything is the same, only now you are no longer in jail.  That's what it feels like.

September 4 2009

23:03.  Earthquake lasting about twenty seconds, nothing to rock my world but an earthquake nevertheless.

Strange twists and turns in fate.  I feel like a mobius strip doing the hokey-pokey.  Consider highlights:

Two nights ago about this same time, the town's power went out.  I was busy writing, big push to finish the story, which keeps having working title changes, more on that later.  So, the power outage did not really bother me since I was not actively using the Internet.  For full disclosure, my Internet comes to me by a wireless receiver mounted on the Crow's Nest landing.  It requires alternating current to function, so when the power goes out my Internet goes down.  Historically, I just use my dialup account at those times and do my Internet through a phone line and have around two hours of battery power.  But the current generation computers don't seem to carry phone jacks anymore.  Imagine that.  My last two laptops no longer carried diskette drives since the CD / DVD recording and playing technology are universal.  But a phone jack for a dialup connection?  Yep, obsolete.  At least my old laptop has one, so I can connect using the laptop that does not have all my current information and do online banking if I have to or see webmail.  But that is a digression, and the whole point is that when the power went out I was contententedly writing fiction and did not need the Internet.  And I probably wrote for forty-five minutes before I even got up and cased the place for a candle.  I found one and it was only about a quarter used.  When I used up the battery power down to ten percent and shut it down, I opened my collection of Ellen Gilchrest short stories entitled In the Land of Dreamy Dreams and was promptly blown away by the first story, despite my difficulty reading by the light of a single candle.  Outside my window, I can see the back of the Chinese restaurant one block over, and I had noticed it before during a blackout that they must have a generator since it stays lit up.  At this point the power has been out around three hours, and I head over under a misting sky and order seafood soup and continue reading the wonderfully decadent New Orleans blueblood stories of a woman that published that book while living in the town of my birth, a woman whom I had had the opportunity to hear talk shortly following the publication of her Victory over Japan collection in the early eighties.  The waiter returned to my table to ask if there had been an error, if it was really the seafood soup that I wanted or if it was not instead the wanton soup that I normally had.  It was a legal inquiry.  Over the past year since they re-opened there in their new location I have eaten there perhaps ten times, always accompanied by a book, and never ordered anything other than the wanton soup.  I confirmed that I was feeling a bit adventurous, perhaps due to the blackout, and that I was going for the seafood soup.  I read, delightedly, wondering when the power would come back on, and the soup came, and I tucked in.  It was pretty good, but it is their most expensive soup and did not really have any chunks of fish or shrimp, but before I was able to reach that conclusion definitively, their fuel must have run out.  Now that I think about it, maybe they are on battery backup because I did not hear a generator.  At any rate, I had to feel around through pitch for the last half of the bowl, and as the the blades of the fan came to a stop and the air stilled, I found myself getting warmer and eating hot soup and think that I have an idea now about what a "hot flash" might feel like.  Back in the Crow's Nest I read and read and could not get enough of Ellen Gilchrist and I was about to get to the end of about the tenth story my candle burned out, so there was nothing left to do but go to bed.  Despite a cloudy sky, there must have been a pretty good moon out, because it was light outside the windows, and from the streets rose shrieks from spectral revelers, the town painted a fuzzy silver, the air still.  Sleep came over time and in waves and rose and fell toward consciousness so that at some point I realized that I had slept a little and outside the human noise had quieted and later I was awakened by the pad of a cat across the zinc roof beside me and at one point became conscious that the air had cooled considerably and there was a little breeze coming through.  I drifted up again as birdsong sprang from the night and marveled that the power was still off and awakened marvelously fresh for good at seven to full morning streaming in through my open curtains, the morning's breeze coursing through the western windows and out the eastern ones.  Less than one minute after awakening, the power came on.  I had a day of big plans lined out and the return of the power seemed at the moment like a kind of psychic exclamation point, a favorable pronouncement on all intentions, but as I reflected back on the thirteen hours of power outage, it was a little bit odd to recognize that an entire sequence of events and actions and thoughts on my part were driven by an external factor over which I had no control.  Perhaps it is time for me to scratch together the dough for a battery back up for once and for all.

Yesterday was as bipolar as it gets.  The goals were the installation of the hot water heater on the roof to my left and the installation of the new air conditioning unit on the roof to my right.  Hot and cold meets east and west.  At the Tigrin woodshop, they broke four sheets of glass before finally cutting the 4' x 8' sheet of extra-thick glass I ordered for the faceplate of the hot water heater.  The saga began on Tuesday, when Olly broke a piece off the first sheet and refused to cut another without the owner present to do it, refusing to take responsibilities for screwing up the cut.  I have Lalo and Wicho on full time this whole past week, $50 a day in payroll for them, and while we were held up for the final part waiting on Luis Thompson to show up and have Olly cut the damned glass, I had them weld up the roof mounts and clean my air conditioner upstairs and clean the ice maker in Juanita's.  Finally Luis shows up and they cut a sheet to size, presumably, and Wicho picks it up and transports it over to the shop to complete the water heater, and it turns out that they had cut it 104 cm wide rather than 114 cm wide.  Now, poor Olly is beside himself with worry over this glass-cutting debacle.  Olly runs Luis's woodshop, and he can cut any kind of wood any kind of way, but Luis sells glass also, and Olly is a carpenter, not a glazier.  Long story short they broke two more sheets of glass before they finally called in a specialist and were able to finally deliver the sheet of glass.  Good thing that my AC downstairs had sketched out on me the day before and propelled me to finally lay down and get a new unit.  I have this idea that the split is going to be much more efficient and save me money as well as work better.  Let's hope so; I pay over $1200 every month for electricity for CafeNet, Juanita's and the Crow's Nest, and probably 85% of that is power to cool things:  air conditioners, refrigerators, freezers, beer coolers, ice maker.  Long story short they get the unit installed nice and neat, everything wrapped up yesterday, and I decide to let it sit and not fire it till today, so we get the new glass, cut to the measure over to the shop, and all the while that this installation is happening, I have been working on a print advertising ad for Osa Water Works (shown below) and making the rounds to see how things are going and doing correspondence in between, taking calls and marveling at how cool the new AC unit fits in right above the CafeNet front door and how big and dominating it looks.  It made me chilly just looking at it, and I was smiling mightily and was so happy that when the Internet went out at six and Pacheco  called to warn me that it was another lightning strike at the tower and this would be eighteen hours or so before service would be restored I was not even really that pissed.  In fact I wasn't pissed at all.  In fact, I looked at it not as a challenge but as an opportunity.  And so as I savored the next day's opportunity to feel the cold blast of the new air conditioner, I listened to reggae night downstairs with the contracted Rivers of Zion or Streamers of Babylon or whatever they are called reggae DJ outfit and wrote contentedly until late, when I cooked home fries and went to bed.

By eight I could hear the stirrings of tools and the whack of PVC pipe against the side of the building and the pitches of familiar voices collaborating to achieve some momentary objective and imagined them preparing to hoist the water heater onto the roof and lifted the curtain and made coffee and clicked the button of the electric gate and went downstairs.  The hot water heater was a spectacle to behold, encased hermetically in the thick glass, the fibre-glassed wooden sides impermeable, the whole assembly tight and sturdy.  I hefted a corner and admired it, and I think I may have broken into a sweat just looking at it.  It seemed to radiate heat just sitting there innocently in the back yard, and now I wonder if maybe the grass did not get a bit scorched from contact, but I honestly have not confirmed this with a visual..  Wicho and I repaired to CafeNet to throw the switch on the air conditioner, and sure enough after it was on for a couple minutes and began to blow cold, it was like a Siberian breeze, an Arctic arrival to the central nervous system of Puerto Jimenez, CafeNet El Sol, downtown main street, and we were all very happy, Katiana very smug and coy behind the desk in her short skirt and managerial severity.  I checked out their first plan for getting it onto the roof and figured that it was like sausage, something I might enjoy once it was done but would be better to not watch it being done.  They plumbed it at noon and took me up on the lunch I offered from Juanita's.  After lunch Wicho came up shaking his head, and it was back to the drawing board.  The plastic of the pipe melted inside my solar hot water heater.  Within one hour of deployment the PVC drain pipe that I used was deformed and collapsed.  It's kind of funny.  I had the internal heating element in the sun and filled with water for one month to test for leaks heating up in the sun, prior to finishing the box .  Never a leak, nothing.  Within one hour of deployment of the finished heater, the same plastic now painted black and encapsulated in an insulated black box and placed on a roof top in the full tropical sun, the same tubes collapsed from heat stress.  So, the news, while disappointing in the instant gratification reward center, nevertheless is promising in terms of the basic heating model.  Undaunted, I am back to the shop on Monday, to test out the second prototype, this time half the size, with extra thick walled high pressure PVC.  I am skipping the intermediate gauge PVC and can test that if this trial works.  If it is too hot for any thickness of PVC, then I will do it in galvanized steel, but it will weigh a ton (figuratively), be more costly, and require welding and braising and get more and more expensive.. 

Twelve hours later, I still do not have Internet, and while I have made the most of the time writing fiction and following along with the progress and setbacks with the hot water heater, this is beginning to chap me.  It's nobody's fault, or if it is I'm sure they are already aware of it, and everybody is surely learning something from the experience, perhaps even me, but it is once again, like the night without power, a path that is like a detour from the one I have charted for myself, and in the cruising of new unintended territory off road, there is always that possibility of hitting a mud patch and getting stuck or having a flat and being otherwise delayed over and above what the delay from a strictly routine detour might imply.  Perhaps it is a small sacrifice to make to get to live in paradise. And perhaps it is ultimately true at some scale everywhere.  Perhaps in New York City the Internet and power never go down.  But think of  how much of their lives those people waste in subways and taxi cabs. 

I think that the length of this post is directly proportional to my frustration at enduring an Internet outage that has now extended into its 26th hour.  It simply does no good to be annoyed about this, and I have to keep all things in perspective and clear my mind from the static that wants to insert itself at times of presumptive privation.  You may laugh, but I am now not able to see the Gilchrist collection that I have been reading, and it is not at first glance on any surface in this room, and it is too hard down here to come across a book worth reading to lose one you're in the middle of, especially one written by an author that lives in the town you were born in and whom you once had the opportunity (bud didn't do it) to go see speak.  Hopefully it is in the truck. 

As soon as I have Internet and electricity at the same time, again, I am going to buy me a ticket out of this crazy place for a well-deserved break from paradise!

September 1 2009

My camera decided suddenly to remember its programming, and the battery charger dried out, finally, and is charging batteries.  A bit of progress on the solar hot water heater.  Should finish tomorrow.  Am within a couple days of buying a ticket to Arkansas for the 24th, which will give me 14 days before an October 7 departure for a new incarnation of the Great Central American road trip.  All systems go for a spring box install in Hatillo, finally landing a concession application stewardship nod.  Tonight am struggling with advertising design, OWW first.  Sold another water purification system, another surge protector.  If the water heater works, my whole next year may be engraved in destiny's etch-a-sketch engraving, making and selling water heaters. 

First, as they say:  Do no harm.

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