October 31, 2009, Puerto Jimenez

Halloween.

Dan moved his stuff over to his new apartment, which is really quite large and nice and comfortable, and we retrieved all the goods shipped from the Costa and delivered the tools and merchandise to the house next door.  Dan has his books in his truck.  I am sitting here in the Crow's Nest as the sun's weight exceeds its stamina in the western sky and the fading light rustles up gusts of eager twilight breezes. 

My world is eerily still, and Dan's absence feels odd, like something is out of place.  Tonight will be the first night since the 5th of October that we do not sleep under the same roof.  And only two of those nights did we have separate rooms, the night before the trip in Brodey Bend and the night we spent at Villas Manu, where Alex was able to accommodate us in separate bedrooms.  We have surely done well with the extensive contact without any arguments or differences of opinion that had to be voiced.  I imagine there were probably things in each of our behavior that the other had to make allowances for, but if that is so, we both did, and never argued about anything. 

But it is nice to be return to my natural state as a gas and be able without impinging upon anybody to expand to fill all the volume available to me, and I am doing so at this very moment.  I may take in a Halloween party this evening, though I am not inspired enough to try to craft a costume on such short notice and anyway the ticos don't get costumes and so it is always one of those mixed groups things here.  In the ten years that I have been here the evolution of the town can be seen in this year's celebration of Halloween.  It is simply not a tico holiday or custom.  Yet there are three theme parties tonight, and I saw kiddies dressed up today as witches and goblins, so a globalized consumer invasion has extended its tentacles from the consumer mothership in the United States to its satellite daughter vessels here in the outposts.

I may have to make a further entry later tonight.  November feels like a work given over to industry and not one in which navel exploration is likely to figure as an integral and vital need.  The last time I said something of this sort, my only two fans, Mom and Dad, sent me letters nearly threatening that I not discontinue this, but the pure truth is that I have by this point said just about all there is to say, so it may be time to be quiet for awhile to see if the fallow lands are able to recharge their nutrients and to send willowy chutes greening upward.

My windiness might do well for me to revert to an exercise:  one month of haikus.  I'll have to think on that.

Okay, here is a first effort to see if I am up for it:

October 30, 2009, Puerto Jimenez

The somewhat larger than life month of October, 2009 draws to within a single day of its curtain call, and the implications leave me contemplative.  My return to Paradise is without none of the possible ironies, delicious all.  The return to the grind is not as alluring and exhilerating as a part of me would like to pretend it is to justify the use of a couple fifty cent words.  Or maybe that is the other side of the mountain, an uninspired coasting on pedestrian words.

I am not sure what to think about the veneer of banality with which things are cloaking their colors from the real world.  I don't think it was all just imaginary.  As October bows deeply, the sprites of November chaff at the pretension and frivolity of ikhanic fritters in a footrace with a relentless opponent, time, through an echo chamber of malleable destinies.

October 29, 2009, Puerto Jimenez

Back in the Crow's Nest after a flash trip up to Hatillo yesterday to the job site, then a trip to a fish farm out of Tinamastes to spend the night at Villas Manu and hike all over the Hatillo mountains this morning under a withering sun and swells of steam from the grass of the building site.

I feel entitled to a sense of entitlement to this arrival.  Our landing three days ago was utterly great, but with the knowledge that I had to turn around and head off pen it made the homecoming somewhat brief.  But off the road now with the Ruby Racer winded and needing mechanical loving, it is great to not have a trip out in my immediate plans.  It feels like I have returned to a universe that has had a net shift in its axis of symmetry.  Maybe it's just me.  But the overall effect feels like a favorable one, and I will have to settle for it.

The return to the fold after the wildly non-representative past thirty days of road-tripping is nothing if not odd.  I am not quite in the mood for doing emails or accounting or web development or other things.  It was fun to get out into watersheds yesterday and today and to see the water.  Reminded me I need to get into better shape.  I will need to study the road map very closely to stay on the best route available.  There seem to be so many choices.  It is an enviable problem to have, but it is still not like having arrived or anything.  It is all a continuing bunch of work.  Not sure how I feel about it, but I expect to eventually rise to the occasion. 

October 07 - ??  ROAD TRIP

See http://www.centralamericanroadtrip.com/2009-web%20log.htm for blog entries during the Great North American Road Trip 2009.

October 06 2009, Brodey Bend, Wright, Arkansas

We're done.  The truck is packed.  Our affairs are in order.  Dan had the windshield changed this morning, and I got off my PADI diver's certification application with photograph and Orpheus's diploma, my last two commitments.  I transferred all my personal effects to the new computer case Dad gave me, delighted with the new space and much better room for it.  No time for jawing now, as I have only the next three hours or so to do the last catch up on web particulars before hitting the hay.  Tomorrow we set off at seven a.m.

October 05 2009, Brodey Bend, Wright, Arkansas

Tomorrow is the last day before a Wednesday departure.  I got my shopping done, bought some warm fuzzy shirts and some shorts on clearance sale, some toiletries, a couple knives for gifts, and my new camera!  Tomorrow we have only to pack and do a bit of mailing, spend one more night here on the river, and then we're off the next day.

The feeling is odd, an addled kind of disjointed rushed feeling.  I feel like the Star Trek landing crew must feel when it is in the process of being beamed up, like I am not completely here, like part of my mass has been converted to energy in motion, and the feeling is like the itch of a phantom limb no longer there, like the hair standing up on the back of my neck in the genetic memory of walking the savannah in the midst of real predators.

My sabbatical targets remain incompletely satisfied, and I can well imagine that in coming days the lightness of the road will be anything but conducive toward any kind of recuperation.  Still, I appear to have landed a job that will begin next week and to have kept the ball rolling and at a needful time. 

October 04 2009, Brodey Bend, Wright, Arkansas

Before first light I awakened to the gentle patter of rain falling outside.  As the light invaded the room and Sunday rode in on the morning train and got off at the station the rain continued and there was no overriding reason to get up and I let myself walk through a world of dreams and unimaginable places with rivers and plateaus and bears and people close to me doing unexpected things and finding myself in unusual circumstances.  Absolutely fantastic. 

Old people are supposed to get up early, but every single day that I have been here, except for yesterday, I have made the coffee and marveled at my father's ability to defy his old fogeyness and remain contentedly and adolescently ensconced in a world of slumber, despite the day's oppression, and today was no exception.

I backed quickly out of any idea of driving anywhere.  The day was a sea of grey, and there was nothing more rational than to withdraw and huddle.

I spent the last of my Costa Rican money on a lingering bill and wiped my life savings down to $200 in Central American, though with $1000 in firm accounts receivable, and $3900 stateside.  Oops . . . I am $1600 in debt so my net worth is actually only $2300 stateside, $3300 overall, but I am not complaining.  Big bidneth abideth, and I have reasonable expectations of banking some reasonable dough before December and to roll out a decent revenue streak in 2010.

Tonight we celebrate my late uncle, James Franklin Collar.  Seven years ago tonight was his last night among the living and celebrated in this very domicile.  His memory is one that is a bit larger than life and humbles me.  The eulogy is one that I am not prepared to deliver in my state of minor exhaustion and semi-inebriation.  But we celebrate the man, the institution and the free spirit against which all measure of collar-ness must necessarily and inevitably be measured, despite his reversion to the Germanic spelling, Kahler.  Jim was a man claimed way before his time, not just before, but way before.  It gives pleasure to speak of cheating death and playing hop-scotch with God, but it is a cruel and awful defeat when we must acknowledge being cheated by death and God playing hop-scotch with us, and so it was with my incomparable uncle.

The peaceful rest can be achieved only by the living, and Jim's memory displaces the notion into a kind of time and space warp.  We were all cheated by Jim's harvest by that dark spirit of death, and nothing makes it okay, and it never shall.  When the fruit is cut unripe nobody is nourished by the culling.

October 03 2009, Brodey Bend, Wright, Arkansas

Big leftovers on a beautiful day, as I go to the mat to get my money out of this bottle of Tanqueray.  I have discovered that anybody with that nose up in the air business about waving a vermouth cap over the shaker or pushing the capped bottle near to the shaker, and all the other mechanisms of the very dry martini are completely missing the magic.  A martini without vermouth is simply gin.  But with vermouth, it becomes a thing apart, analogous, I have always maintained, to the combination of sushi and sake.  And it is a cocktail in which the vermouth is a strangely vital ingredient.  I am drinking mine wet and dirty, that is, with an adequate measure of vermouth and a splash of olive brine straight from the jar.  I have also in this bottle's experimentation determined that the "up" mandate is a fetish beyond the exigencies of this martini miscreant.  I have the gin thickening in the freezer, the vermouth in the fridge, so shaking on ice is superfluous, and frankly at such sub-zero states of thermal contraction, the amount of ice that melts is so little that it would take a real prick to claim to tell the difference, and on the rocks you don't have to gulp the thing to get it inside your mouth frosty cold.  So, my $41 investment ($44 counting the olives) has served as a vehicle for the debunking of all those faggoty effete martini laws that probably mostly originated from a fictional character of British pop fiction anyway, that sua-vay and deboner man of mystery, licensed to kill mostly ladies (pussy galore indeed), James "Pun-Intended" Bond.

Dan and I huddled outside under a bath of sunlight in a lawn stretching out its fleeting lifespan to weigh strategy and examine the payload of our newly beloved Sunka Waken, given that Pegasus is winged and mythical, Sea Biscuit was a bit on the coddled side, and Rocinante was knock-kneed and the material more of glue than graceful carriage.  And we found it all to be reasonably good and well.

The days wind down like a clock on borrowed time, if time actually exists as I am assured by my brother, Toady the Fabulo Aqualung, that it technically does not, and the nose of the Ram-Tough unnamed Rocinante-Like Sunkawakenian steed flares its nostrils at the warmth of the southerly breeze and paws the ground imperiously.  If we can coax these few days more of time for its gentle cooperation and forestall any untimely surprises, we shall turn our jib into the breeze, hew the rudder firmly and direct our attentions toward equatorial penchants.

. . . stop it, stupid, stand down and stow it. . .

Aiiieeee, if it is not a rhyme, alliteration rises like the vanquished virtue of a formerly virgin vixen, in versimilitudinous simile and metaphorical metastasis. 

Nooooo!  Tear me away, Phaedrus from the awful allusions of lives lived long, and cache that onerous onomatopoeia that murmurs its susurrant and sibilant whisper like an overstated haiku on steroids to garrote brevity and verbal temperance like old Luca Brasi with one hand pinned by a stiletto to the bar, the other clutching at his constricted throat.

Cry havoc, wrote Shakespeare, and let slip the dogs of war . . .

October 02 2009, Brodey Bend, Wright, Arkansas

Twice baked potatoes are made and in the toaster oven for their second baking, and four pounds of chicken thighs are marinating in a multi-splendored concoction.  I have tea ready for Brandon, and I have olives now for the fully legitimate martinis.  Mailed the Seattle bound stuff and deposited the check from Tahnee and $2000.  After running errands for Dad and shopping, am down to a couple hundred in cash with the rest banked.

Dan messaged from Conway about an hour ago and is headed first to Searcy to see Brandon.  We are looking for them down here around six.  I have only to clean out my stuff in the back and make those beds to leave everything ready for their arrival.  Well, I have to make a salad, but that is a last minute thing.  We are going to start a fire with the oak firewood and transfer coals to the grill for the chicken.

My sabbatical has not been very fruitful, and with the date rushing up on us, am not likely to do much.  May decide to head out a couple days early, or perhaps one.  May get in one full day's worth of miscellaneous development stuff.

--

Well. . . hours later and after the gold rush it is all so very different.  A few blocks have been built a few lincoln logs stacked, eggos leggo'ed except for Cain and Abel, everybody expecting rain or else sniffing snow . . . or something like that.

I inhabit a strange and bizarre emporium where nothing is for sale, just for rent and all the interest bearing notes carry the portraits of puppies, all of them sick.  Now his nurse, some local loser in charge of the cyanide hole, penny whistle, hear them moan, your head leaned with skinny girls and Cassanova out across DESOLATION ROW.

October 01 2009, Brodey Bend, Wright, Arkansas

Today is Day 7, counting down, and it's nearly over. 

The first day of each month looks so naked and forlorn on the Ikhanosphere.  It is like a kitten with laryngitis, dripping wet, barely anything there, mouth open but nothing coming out, and too wet and gross to even intimate warm and cuddly.

I spent $41 today and walked out of the liquor store with one liter of tanqueray and a half liter of martini and rossi and then forgot to stop and by olives.  Dad of course does not own a shaker, FAR LESS martini glasses, but I put two plastic glasses together and loss not a drop.  But the martinis were so strong that Dad and I were afraid to have more than one.  I might tempt fate here in another half hour or so.

A storm is blowing in from the west, and the particles of oxygen are ionized and they make my nose tickle.

The trip to Camden was a bit transcendental, deep piney woods and the smells that transport me back the better part of five decades and punctuation marks from all of them. 

Am a bit philosophical about the process of aging.  It is amazing how old I am.  By all reasonable standards, I am nearly a grown adult.  I wonder what it will feel like to finally be one.  There are morbid elements to that mind game that I will mostly refrain from duplicating in print.  But since mind game was brought up, let's point out that I am eight years older than John Lennon ever got the privilege of being.

How lucky is that? 

October 28 2009, Puerto Jimenez, Costa Rica

For the intervening four weeks, see www.centralamericanroadtrip.com.  Here a bit over 24 hours of my return, the nest is lined, the mechanical joints oiled, the wisdom conventional.  It is a strange feeling.  I have never returned to any sense of satisfaction, full less the sort of fulminated variety, but the advances here are big.  Gabriela's gentling along the path of web site development can't be bad for her, and she is sharp and quick and hungry and sees it.  Bloodletting need not involve spatter.

My return to the nest has been like no other.  I am daily in marvel at the fulmination of the dream, the strange ball ever on the roll. 

Then the man, he steps right up to the micropone.

From those about to dine, we salute you!

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