The Ikhanosphere: October 2010

THE IKHANOSPHERE October 2010

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October 16 2010: Crow's Nest, Port Jim

October 15 2010: Crow's Nest, Port Jim

The wind carries upon its shoulders an odor or a hint of one. It is a strange one the olfactory implications of which cannot be recognized beyond the present company. A restlessness stalks the Jimmy streets under a thin mean rain as frogs surely rejoice in the their puddles and the fishes imagine what it might like be to swim in the sky. A dull and retrogressive mental space offers none of the flights of fancy to which I am accustomed, and I can't quite shake it. I can translate and read the news, but the translation of the Juanita's menu leaves me cold with unfulfilled desires all stale out of the package and lounging in the nearest and most available gutter, and the news is even worse in a tea-party infusion of democratic madness in the land of my birth. But there the tide has passed over me and left me in an unfulfilled wake and within an arm's reach of bitter, even cynical. That lariat has me in its sights tonight, but I'm probably to slippery for it to wind up ensnaring. Probably slip off me faster than a vital condom inside a very fat girl . . . but maybe not, and what a disturbing simile, but in the walkup to the midterms I was unable to complete an editorial that I worked on for days. If I can't convince myself, I can hardly hope to convince anyone else.

And it's not cabin fever as the elements yawn in a momentary slowing of its primal oppression.

Will someone please send in the clowns.

October 14 2010: Crow's Nest, Port Jim

October 13 2010: Crow's Nest, Port Jim

October 12 2010: Crow's Nest, Port Jim

October 11 2010: Crow's Nest, Port Jim

Manuela Dominguez dropped me a line tonight out of the blue. Deceptive, too, like. It was a mass-mailing, a spam, though it was about a Mexican peasant receiving an international ecology prize as part of the Nobel awards though it is prize added in the early nineties. Not a personal word. Manuela Dominguez. Hmm, I know a Manuela Dominguez. But surely this can't be the same one. So I wrote back and asked. And it was. She somehow had my address and had forwarded it to me on a lark. But we have not had correspondence since I moved back to Jimenez, even though we originally met in Jimenez. Even traveled together back, when I had designs on having designs on Rocio. After getting an email from Ray Quick less than one week earlier resulting somehow from my eulogy for Windy Austin, it seems to be a time for a reprisal of acquaintances. With Horace freshly returned to Easton from a weeklong visit here and this year's Facebook spawned re-kindling of Bolivian era friends, this year has certainly turned into a blast from the past.

Words fail in the kaleidoscope passage of the day and week. It is not just falling out of the practice of the discipline of writing often but of the hopelessness of managing to encapsulate a portion of its essence in the constrained boundaries of the squiggles of ink that can't be tweaked enough to give the full thrill of its wild carnival ride nor the depths of black plumbed in any well of momentary self-doubt nor the confluence of spices that comprise the curry so different on their own, undetectably transformed in the product . . . in an age of Facebook and Twitter, we pare down to sound bytes if we tango at all. Everything in its fair measure I suppose.

The Khan Man cannot keep all his balls in the air much longer. It is time to inaugurate a Juanita's sunset clause and a line in the sand on this. The 31st of October will mark its 9th anniversary. My goal is to celebrate its tenth anniversary saddled up to the bar under a new ownership and to happily pay my bill rather than give it to myself. Ahem. I am not sure whether to also challenge myself to thirty pounds by December 25th, but I weighed in at 212 pounds the 25th of September when the idea of a real Christmas present to myself first suggested itself.

October 10 2010: Crow's Nest, Port Jim

October 09 2010: Playa Tortuga, Ojochal