Bananode, an Ode toe Bananoes, possibly a la mode. And Tiramebananomisu.

December 27th, 2022

Bananas would seem to grow on trees, but the plant itself is a grass. What injustice, I thought when first encountering the fact --what lack of recognition of the banana's majesty. But botany being the more organized and sensible science against the hodgepodge of my perception, it wins. Even if I'm not entirely sure how one can obtain a leaf, say in which to wrap a tamale, of grass. Wait, was the banana classified after the style of Walt Whitman?! I suspect a bananaliterary conspiracy.

At any rate, to come somewhat more elongatedly to the point: what dreams may come must certainly include bananas. I first saw a banana-grass in Buenos Aires, all wrapped up in wool and leather in the cold. It didn't exactly exude any sort of belonging there; wasn't its place. But it instantly made me feel far away from what I knew. The heady, slightly sour scent of its big glossy leaves that bobbed in the gentlest breeze, the cluster of fruit, recalling something of the honeycomb in its geometry; and the long fuschia-pink protrusion of its flower, a spectacular sunset-hued dancer dangling from the end of an umbilical rope.

It's unlike anything else, except of course its many cousins and odd sisters in law. Plantains, guineos, tiny date bananas smaller than a thumb and thick maduros with golden succulent skin, red and green and yellow and brown. What is the rasta rainbow if not the refraction of banananean palette? The family tree grass holds one general genetic rule as to taste: mild sweetness, with a soft wall of well...nothing behind it, a flavor on an invisible pedestal. While this rule is never broken, it attracts tiny notes to attach to each varietal, sometimes a woody flatness, or the piquancy of youth, perhaps an infinitesimal slash of spice.

In its idiosyncracies the banana family sustains as few fruits can, especially in its indigenous band around the equator. "When it came time to make dinner," I heard the story told, "and my Grandmother, with tears in her eyes, saw that not even a grain of rice was about the house, she would call to me and my little cousin, and tell us to fetch a few guineos from the plant one-left from the northwest corner of the backyard."

There's patio bananas and bananas of the highway, plants tucked into neighborhood parks and peeking out from the chaos of corrugated steel that make up the dark barrios. Any given glance at sus alrededores probably has a bananish secret, if not a full-blown plantaination.

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I've heard tell, too, of the back-breaking, blood-pressure-piquing work of a bananero, that being he who labors in a bananal, which'd be the plantation. The climax is at harvest time, as climaxes ever are: fruits are picked (by which we mean to say hacked off the plant with a large machete) and carried until the arrival of the great banana sky-tram, a basket carried through rows of bananagrass on a horizontal pulley cord. At which point they're chucked in, hopefully --the operation requires a delicate finesse of dead-tired arms and fast-twitch timing.

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What do the bananal's bananeros eat?

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Not this. Tiramebananomisu came about as the conclusion of...nothing too particular. It's neither especially complicated, like the banana itself. You make a normal savoyardi-based tiramisu with zabiglione and all, but you layer in well-ripe beach bananas. Also a coupla layers of dried bananas soaked in dark rum for a day or so and then minced. Also said rum.

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Bananapetit, and let me leave you with the thought: what other thing's bruised flesh can taste so sweet?

Posted in Domestic Training , Recipes | No Comments »

Things I've been doing

December 27th, 2022

Holding the previous article's neck down with my foot for such a long while, I nevertheless naturally managed to do some things with my other limbs. Without question the cutest is this guy:

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Nikki and I got a dog. I was worried I'd give in to one of the many nonhousable animals she asks for on the regular 1 , but as luck would have it we ended up with indeed a canine; bichon habanero , or Havanese. We styled him "Pelin", after the wormwood-laced Romanian wine that so often accompanied Mircea at his baths.

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He's great to take exploring, of which there's been plenty. If one ceases to understand the world, what better balm than to try to move wider, walk deeper? I'll hail luck again at the thought of having so far avoided the many snakebites, spider bites 2 , slight-brushup-against-some-caterpillar-nervous-system-collapse, landslide-escort-off-the-road-into-some-crazy-ass-ravine...you know, the common nicks and cuts that happen here. I haven't even been too badly accosted by buskers. But what is a lot more interesting at this point than how (or how not, even), pardon me; firstly there's the curated jungle:

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And one of the best municipal crests I've yet seen:

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Studies in the Eternal Children's Cloudforest (which yes! does exist, o land of fairytales fighting for space to outdo one another!):

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What shall we take, the Calender Trail or the Trail of the Bats? Easy decision if you ask me.

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But no, there weren't any. What were: bellbirds, toucans, coati --and a great tribe of them 3 , too--, all manner of lizards and geckoes and damselflies and their better halves. Perhaps most importantly, there was a perfectly clear, felt-lined silence on which was laid the filigree of the forest's sounds.

And then there was coffee.

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A great deal of coffee, as per usual, but more...exploratory of the traditional than my own tradition. Some things I've learned: that coffee dried with the fruit retains a honey capable of wildly changing the flavor of a brew (and that thus far I don't exactly like it), that some fruits are bright yellow rather than red, that some of the world's most poisonous snakes happen to like to sleep wound up in the trunks of coffee plants, and that despite the numerous and occasionally humorous attempts at improving on the standard chorreado , I still like it the best.

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Speaking of originals, here be the ruins of Ujarras, and here's the original, ha, indian name for the place, searched high and low over the supposedly omniscient internet without success, to the degree that some monstrous pdf of the linguistic permutations of the Cabecar moontalk was pored over until finally I broke down and drove the ~two hours back to the place to take a picture of its namesign, also previously absent online. 1681 with some early 20th century restoration.

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Said restoration being a little shoddy, it's nevertheless a pleasant place, if for the attendant wisterias and bromelia-pocked cypress, the flowers-within-flowers-within-flowers of the purlieu I've come to love the most, and so love quite a lot: where the forest meets the jungle.

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But more of that later. For the now-of-the-then, I mean, as much of then as we have time for now, presently as it was, I've been playing around with the usual machines plus a new sort, incumbent with about as many problems which are about as maddening as their brethren, if less...impactful. As so:

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The newfangleds are so impressive as to have errors and eyesores prepared and hotkeyed:

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Meanwhile the local pok nexus of sewingery and millineura has the cutest mouselet murals ever.

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Burt Plantcaster's been taking on a lot more friends and fambly, and the balcony garden takes a good eight liters a day of water, by now. Burt's special distilled grog not included, ofc.

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I've also been training for boxing. One year, first gloves I bought are still intact, taken a cracked rib, given...well, not much, but one particular right hook sent the trainer for his tylenol, and I'm certainly better than I was.

I'm better than I was a year ago in many aspects. It demanded rather a lot of time and concentration, often away from what are still great focuses for me, like writing, but I do feel something like stable. It might be a stable oscillation, but the extremes of suddenly finding life so different are becoming pleasant to accept, to search for, even.

The bimbo has been helping me a lot, especially through her steady resilience and dedication to keep on walking. Hell, even her less successful attempts at confronting so much change have taught me plenty. And when that boxing trainer isn't training, he's probably with me, knitting out a story about working the coffee plantations or showing me new places to view the valley, to see the people.

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So there it is, and there it was; a year of many new things, and a great deal of luck. I've lost forever, but have not broken, and will keep turning again and again to the wind.

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  1. "Hi, how's it goin'? It's pretty todayhuhsaycanwegetagoat?" [↩ ]
  2. Why is snakebite one word and spider bite two? [↩ ]
  3. Wait, what is the collective noun for coati? A band , apparently, but that really doesn't do us any justice here. It was more like Zounds! Coati! [↩ ]

Posted in Dystopia , Euphoria , Nature , Physical Training , Travel | No Comments »

Oratory of a mourning slave

November 27th, 2022

I. Invocation

Master. The numbers don't exist for how many things I still want to ask you, to tell you, to find and to forget with you. Oh monument unto yourself, large as ever, looming with I know not what expression, the way I feel you is terribly different, but its weight does not change, the dimensions and intensity are all the same. How I still yearn to be pressed by that weight into moulds I know are wise for they come from your hand. I let myself be pressed now into shapes I can't be sure are right ones, hoping from that font of gratitude, the things I know for knowing you, will come something sane.

But ever do I see and feel that demon 'round my shoulder, that small and mal-formed gray thing whipping up with ugly wings recursion to the mean. And so I look to that very place you formed in me to foster calm, and remember that I've nothing left to fear. What greater gift could anyone hope to ask for, in the end?

My heart, you were the beginning of me, and I will carry you to my end.

II. Realization

I don't know why I thought I could get by without writing it out. Sitting at my desk, three keyboards sit askew asking if I'd care to graze across them, tell the tale, and somehow...

...somehow a year after the death, I've managed to not testify it. It's come out in sobs, here and there, always by mouth, often enough after outright begging to just be heard, because no one wants to hear it. It's filed away in some obscure tendril of bureaucracy. I only realize now, in the wake of the thought that truly, I too died that day, that the deep obligation to recount what happened rests upon me.

What horror and what dread, scions of strange new nightmares come to me at the very thought of going back to that day clearly enough so as to report it sensually and not merely as a list of facts. The loss, wider and more profound than the ocean that caused it, stretches out infinitely before my mind, and I shudder at the sheer volume. The count. I'm outnumbered, and so vastly that it doesn't matter anymore what exactly comprises one unit .

Committing, then, feels like agreeing to a free tattoo; I've no idea how it'll go but I'm guaranteed it'll leave its mark, whateveritbe, forever.

III. Elucidation

How beautiful and elegant are those moments during which you realize, in perfect real-time, that you'll remember fondly forever. Such was the stretch and heavy hug that he gave me when I woke him up that day, well before the dawn. I can keenly remember the warmth of him, the softness of his pajamas against my skin, and the slight but happy groan that came from somewhere in the beard. He'd had maybe three hours of sleep, and I'd had maybe five. It was thin sleep but it was part of how we'd come to enjoy the beach after years of experimenting with hours: leave as early as possible. To leave at five am then, the earliest time to be on the road given the daily curfew, required rising at four. It was a typical pre-beach routine that day, with all the coldness and deep blues of the morning air, the crackling of aluminum foil around sandwiches, the faint scent of sunblock wisping out of freshly packed bags. The difference was that Nikki wasn't coming, and so our usual slit-eyed but smiling encounters were missing.

Descending the stairs to leave, he expulsed all trace of tired fight from me with the unabashed joy of his lens; he laughed back at a cackling gecko and asked if I thought they missed us when we were gone. He tapped with fondness the little felt frog hidden among the iron bars on the landing. He bent over the begonias newly blooming there and said how beautiful! .

The early morning ride to the coast was fertile ground for some of the greatest dissemenations that ever could be. We talked of games, of the soul of the sale, of the mind of the rube. But of the things I'll oblige to share and those I won't, strangely enough I choose to keep that day's conversation behind the curtain. I'll say I was as content and humble as at my best when, with the opening of the sky from somber grays to ecstatic tourmaline, we arrived.

Product of my own processes, I always felt a rush to get to the water, which meant changing, exchanging the heels for flip-flops, and moving the middling-elaborate baggage train from the car's trunk to the water's edge, some couple hundred meters away, in that spot just over the first sandy break where the high tide never surprise-hit to steal a towel and there was less foot traffic.

No foot traffic, really, as that was one of the prime attractors of this beach in the first place: at all hours but especially in the early morning, it was rare to come across anyone else. Maybe a spare surfer or two, or someone dwindling a slow shore walk, but in either case, distant, non-intrusive, barely visible. That particular morning I ducked into the bathroom of the little hotel where we parked, not really wanting to dash madly into the ocean to pee, but at the same time feeling guilty for adding more time to my set-up. He was already swimming; my first moves were to get him from cufflinked suit and lace-up shoes to beach shorts and sandals, then spray him down in that hated but necessary aerosol-delivered sunscreen. The one that smells like cupcakes, we called it. "See you soon!" he said sweetly as he took off to enjoy what he enjoyed while I worked to catch up.

III.i Delerium

"Is that your dog?" Some scruffy dude asked as he walked by my freshly-laid towel (the one Master had specially made to comfortably fit five or six, a truly luxurious expanse of terrycloth) and small city of bags. A pair of mongrels had trotted by to investigate, probably lulled by the scent of the sandwiches in the icebox. "Nah." He walked on. I put my hair up, I took my glasses off, but not before seeing where the master was, at his usual distance, further out than ever felt controllable --but I knew too that the firmly crossed line of comfort was part of the ocean's appeal, for him.

I walked into the waves intent on reaching him, but felt the usual dread as I got closer. A few times I'd sensed we were being carried out by the current, in the past. And once, we had very much found ourselves in a pull. But we always overcame it, even the time he'd gotten so thrashed and spun around he came out with blue lips and had to rest a half hour before moving again. I was confident that he could handle it, but less confident about myself, and so while we were almost always in the water together, we weren't quite together. I kept my short distance, a decision I fight to not hate myself over every day and imagine I always will, like a thousand other choices that morning that replay over and over in my head. I can't know if things would've turned out better if I'd acted differently. I try to stand on the logic, to listen to those who tell me that his death was not my fault, to follow the lines of reason, but they're often enough washed away and scrambled in the chaos of the water.

Floating on my back, I heard him yell something. "What?" I uselessly replied over the roar of the waves. "Master, I can't hear you!" How desperate I felt in the water, with my vision and my hearing both tamped down to nearly nothing. But the next thing he said, I heard, as I paddled closer --"Help."

III.ii Defeat

I fought against suddenly angry waves to get closer to the hazy image of his head, the occasional flash of a hand. "Master come to me, come towards the sound of my voice! Here!" The water crashed with greater and greater fury, and I felt the clean, hard strength of the current's pull as I got closer. I saw his head go under again and again, and knew he was in actual trouble this time, unable to keep his head above the waves. I pushed myself to him as hard as I could and in what must have been less than half a minute, but what felt like an eternity, I found his hand and pulled. I pulled as hard as I could; I felt him grip my hand. We both went under and I felt myself shoot up again in a rage of determination, my hand iron-clad to his. "Help!" I screamed as loud as I could once I broke the surface.

Many are the particular moments that play in loops in my head, deliberately and on some background, subconscious screen I can only really make out if I stop everything else and focus on it. Those few seconds finding his hand, feeling it respond to mine, and pivoting the law from "get to him" to "get him the fuck out", comprise heavy hits. I can't help but try to see and feel it from every possible angle, to hear and taste it on all sides, to ask it somehow, as though a moment is something with which one could actually converse -- "Did he die because I wasn't enough?".

Over and over again I screamed as I tried to move us back towards the shore. For a moment it'd seem we'd made progress; the next we were further out, and always new waves were crashing over us, inching us away from whatever direction I was trying to move in. I saw distant rectangles in the far distance that I knew must be people; I screamed and screamed, and eventually felt my foot hit the bottom. Still latched to his hand, I pulled as hard as I could against the current, still yelling frantically, trying to signal with my free arm, aware that his face had gone in the water, nothing in me but saltwater, panic, and the dead, no-thought, racing need to get us the fuck out of the ocean.

As I collapsed the third or forth time in what was now only waist-deep water, I saw a man running towards us. He tried to take my arm, and I barked at him to help me get the man out of the water. We pulled, each with one of his arms in tow, struggling awfully against that hungry riptide. At knee-height I fell again and couldn't rise, the acid in my legs too much now to move. The man dragged him over my useless body. I crawled to them; we started trying CPR. His eyes wouldn't open; his chest wouldn't rise. I slapped him, I talked to him, I screamed for more help.

And more help came; I can't say how many people rushed to us to try to offer their technique or animate him as if by sheer will. Maybe six? It felt like a crowd, and I wanted them off him, but I also wanted someone to know exactly what to do. It didn't occur to me that he might die. It just wasn't something on the list of possibilities, even if it was always possible. A few minutes passed (another eternity), and the sickening idea that he might actually suffer some sort of neurological damage here started to set in.

The ambulance was coming; they'd called it, any second now. They'd come with the Right Equipment, the Correct Methods, they were coming to make this shit stop so I could see his eyes open again and he'd say oh holy shit what a wave jump that was, maybe we should call it a day and go home? Just a tiny bit longer, I told him, they're coming, hang on. But foam was starting to come out of his mouth when our hands pressed against his heart.

III.iii Denouement

The Red Cross guy ran over to us from somewhere up on the road, directed by an apparently gathering crowd I heard on the periphery. He kneeled in the sand and started to administer the Official CPR that my flooded head imagined would fix everything. He asked me how long he'd been in the water. "I don't know, twenty minutes," I answered, before realizing he meant how long had the man been drowning. "It was maybe two or three minutes, with the problem." I stumbled over my spanish, willing everything to just stop and make my Master breathe again.

He took a pulse. He shook his head. I heard the machine hooked up to master's chest beep, but only when the medic's hands pressed against him. After yet another eternity, he shook his head again and said, "it's difficult." And he stopped the CPR. "What?!" I didn't look at him as I bent back in to keep pressing against his chest, keep inflating his lungs with the the mask. "It's difficult," he said again, and in some twisted back and forth he managed to tell me that there was nothing for it. I kept pumping and felt the crowd around me getting closer, a hand here or there landing on my shoulders. The medic started to pack up his shit.

I stopped. It's not clear to me at all what constituted apparently reasonable criteria for me to stop. I somehow knew it was necessary. I remember seeing the mist rising from the tide in the distance against that jungle bluff that formed the delicious curve on the road to the beach. I remember feeling the sun getting hotter as it rose higher. I remember a few people offering me their bottled water, saying they were sorry, reminding me that riptides were dangerous, asking if I had any kids. I sat there bewildered, more truly bewildered than I'd ever been, and I stroked his hands, and I kissed his feet. I buried my face against the soles of his feet, pruned by the water, cold. I kissed his toes slowly and rubbed them softly, curled there beneath him, overcome by the daze.

I don't know how long we laid like that. People left; occasionally new ones came by. Eventually the police showed up, and with them watching over him as though that somehow counted for something, I hobbled to our towel, so far away now, to get his hat, and to get my phone. I had to keep the sun off his sensitive head, and I had to talk to Nikki.

IV. Reality

The body of the Master was laid out in full suit, of course; nothing new for that fine and handsome form. It was attended by two naked slaves in heels; perhaps the only time that particular parlor ever had or will have such a ceremony.

Life since those moments has been unimaginably different even if in many respects it's very much the same. Everything that followed was full of thorns. Is full of thorns. Even if beautiful, they cut, they leak me, they leak the world. For the world is very much less for having lost him. What scenes have played on since that day, a year ago today 1 , and how familiar but how alien. Sometimes it seems I'd always known I'd have to act them out someday, though I can't imagine how I could've ever really been prepared.

?. Exit Music

I look at my hands and hate them for having been too weak to save you. But I love them for the memory of that last embrace, for what I imagine they received. For all the times you held them. For all the things they did well under your own. Your death is a filter through which I see all else, now; before and after, possible and hopeless, real and imaginary. How I long to be on your side. How I can't imagine anything sweeter than experiencing life once having been touched by you.

I will always be open to the pain.

***Epilogue***

I don't entirely know why I had to go back to that particular place on the shore one year from the day, but I did have to go, and so I went. The beach has changed somewhat; for one thing there are a lot more people about these days, even in the early morning. The sand is markedly blacker. But many things remain the same, like the slopes that mark location better than the endless tangle of leaves up by the road, and the presence of curious dogs without obvious owners. Two dobermans walked at my heel as I moved south past the place where we always laid the big towel, south to the spot on the sand where he died. Why is it I imagine he died on the sand, and not in the water, I wonder? From his own point of view, he lost consciousness in the waves. It's my own lens that perceives a hope, some chance, or even at times, something like a choice, as though he were waiting to see how the world would react to the emergency of his sudden absence and at some point on the solid side of that great divide, called it.

I walked to that point and the dogs sat beside me as I stood, staring into the surf. I don't know how long I was there looking, but eventually I had the urge to say something, and so I walked into the water, dropped to all fours, and waited for a wave to crash towards me. When it did, I leaned down my head, I opened my mouth, I took in as much water as I could, stood, and spit the ocean back at itself. Stupid, pointless, a cryptic message for an untooled enemy that could never summon the interest to care.

But the ocean is not my enemy, I realized as I walked and watched the horizon change moods. It is a force he loved; a place he loved; it is the challenge he took and many times enjoyed triumphing over. That I should hate the ocean for finally winning is as ridiculous as the loss itself, and the only thing they have in common is my own suffering. I will use it to learn. To do. To be better. That is what, after all, he taught me.

  1. It was a year past the day when I wrote this. In the intervening months I've waffled considerably over whether to publish this or not, but knowing all the while in some corner of the mind that I can't go guarding the expression of what I wish to keep in myself. I may be slow for a while, even as life progresses at breakneck speed, but I've decided not to plant my life in the mud, just yet. [↩ ]

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Venturing Celestely

February 26th, 2022

Mile after unexpected mile surround us, wrap us up in ribbons of new asphalt blackly cordoning off our sorrow. Like gauze, our memories stay light, transparent to the moment; there, but not all there is, even as we recall a silent ride on this road taken in the thin, slicing heat of the master's absolute fury, or the weight of his disappointment over a forgotten provision, pressing bare feet into similar paths.

The international concert of the artist that managed to get every last hotel in La Fortuna and parts beyond booked nevertheless failed to make enough of an impression so as to have their name remembered. Everyone knew the whole region was full, "of course", and that it was for "the concert", yes naturally, but of whom? "I think they're from Mexico". You could see it as bum luck, I guess, that in an otherwise lazy season, in the midst of a crisis of tourism, we managed to pick for an overnighter that one date presided over by anonymous Mexicanos with cult followings --but the better vantage is the one proposing it's a useful test. Of our preparation, patience, of what we've provisioned, of what we're ready to perceive. The very nature of traveling as we do, without promises, without pre-payments, free to call off whatever the fuck we feel like whenever we feel like it or don't, means occasionally some sort of bridge will be inexplicably out, inviting us to be creative.

Speaking of vantages, allow me to interrupt myself a moment to record the current, while the morning sun still dapples through it, warming my throat and shoulders as I perch above, Bimbo's excellent cold brew decidedly not steaming by my side. A grove of broad-leaved trees stretches out some pleasant walk's worth into the distance, old leaves and fallen flowers carpeting the way. These give off into a languid stream, where birds --kiskadees and montezuma oropendolas 1 -- drink and flit, avoiding the occasional passing of a gardener in deep rubber boots. Against the crunch of leaves underfoot breeze moves through the trees in hushed, tremulous roars, cicadas insisting somewhere in the distance. The air is clean, gloriously unadulterated by anything whatsoever, which, while a near-constant of my life, is nevertheless noticable --a twist of perception I wish carried out as well in everything else.

In being disconnected from the daily flow of life I find myself tethered differently, that common paradox of acid-washing away life's incremental buildups. It's the earth; it's the sun; love itself, expression in leaf and language, undeniably abundant whether I feel like acknowledging them or not. I breathe in and bit by bit, the surroundings help me take the next, whether I want to or not.

rio celeste

Ah, but this view, this perch steeped in peace, had to be clawed and carved out of that National and International yet Apparently Solely Mexican Concert Debacle as I was saying earlier. So after a pleasant four hours' meander through familiar jungle paths to this, our intended sojourn, we found ourselves without a place to stay. "Let's just go to La Fortuna, there's a gazillion hotels, someone's gotta have something." Except that mecca at the base of Arenal was booked up right and proper, from unlit shanties barely indicated on the road to the big resorts with strobing signs suggesting the very essence of amenity. 2 If it wasn't exactly a pity to turn around and head home owing to the beauty of the drive and the pleasure of having spent a day at trying, it wasn't all that ideal either, so as we turned our horses round I made a point of staying awake enough to see if we might not run into something rentable on the road back.

Twenty kilometers or so later, the "Bar and Marisqueria and Karaoke The River with Cabins" managed to meet the well-lowered criteria of 1) visible from the road, 2) with enough space in front to allow pulling off and stopping without having to brace against something 3 . I asked a woman lounging around on one of the cut-trunk makeshift tables whether they had anything for the night, which sent her, all smiles, into the kitchen, which in turn produced a gruff if affable greyhair, evidently the owner-cum-cook. He reached under the bar and brought up a galvanized bucket containing a series of keys, and proceeded to fish around in it thoughtfully. Several keys were turned down despite the evidence that nobody else was there. Eventually, he seemed satisfied with No. 4, and gave it to the woman so she could show me what was on offer.

rio celeste

I've certainly stayed in dingier places, just not any time in all that recent memory. But it was cheap 4 , reasonably clean, and the water did in fact run, so we took it, on the theory that we could check out some of the natural environs we'd come all this way for the next day, and see if the concert deluge had let up any, by then. We passed a fine night as only they happy enough with each other to let immediate circumstances fly for a while may, and though we woke up with nearly a hundred mosquito bites between us, we did manage to sleep. In the light of day, the place looked a little different, and we wondered idly whether the old guy had made this place his project long ago and meanwhile lost his determination, or if he was a newer owner intent (or not) on fixing it up. At any rate, it was apparent that at some point "El Rio" had been a life's aspiration, the nacre of a dream not quite capable of completing the pearl.

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In a typically Costa Rican twist of the unexpectedly fabulous, this place's seafood was beyond exceptional. I don't know if I've heard of more dubious places to try fruits of the sea and fresh-caught filets beyond perhaps an airplane, but I've certainly not been more surprised. I think I had shrimps on the rice device or something.

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With a new day decidedly afoot, we mosied back to our original destination and found it blissfully emptied of concert-goers, and so we let down our suitcases again. This time, much more comfortably.

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A splendid because hard-won repose was had, and then I spent a while appreciating what a proper bathroom looks like:

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So that's: a shower big enough to comfortably fit four or five people, a magnificently large, powerful, vertical shower head, and semi-transparent glass tiling to allow abundant natural light. The curtain's a bizarre if less noticable addition, but otherwise that was one of the best showers I've ever had, and I have no idea why more of 'em aren't designed exactly like this.

Also, the instant mini-bar, as supplied by the Strictly Trained Harem Kitchen Corps 5 :

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We spent a while refreshing and then set out to Rio Celeste, which at long last actually was the true object of this trip, that confluence of rivers where the water was supposedly bright turquoise blue. And, it was!

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But that's a couple of hours' drive away yet; first, we stopped off at a...frankly, I couldn't tell you if this was someone's house, or a store someone else had started and kept passing on to family members who changed its contents every turn, or maybe some sort of community flea market or mini-storage or...they had big coconuts, at any rate, which is what I was after.

rio celeste

As I walked up, three middle aged women were rocking themselves in enormous, ratty barcaloungers, tinny bachata scratching itself out of some receiver somewhere in the piles and stacks of stuff. They slowly if enthusiastically organized themselves into opening a pair of coconuts for me while I looked around and tried to imagine the lives of they who produced this collection, and the organizational scheme, if any, of the owner, if such a role could even be said to exist.

rio celeste

rio celeste

Didja spot the chicks? Because they spotted you, and you don't look to be bringing them more watermelon.

Rio Celeste had been on the list of things to go see for a while, it's just that we'd made several attempts to check it out during the course of other trips and each time been thwarted by an unreasonably shitty road. On the last pass we determined through sheer trial and error that there are three approaches to the place, and the second's the one we want. As it turns out, what we really want is a combination of the first and second approaches, switching the one for the other at the halfway mark between the highway and the little track that winds up to the accessible part of the river, but anyhow; we finally managed, even if it still took a little backtracking.

There's a national park offering a hike to some stretch of this thing. There's also multiple problems there, such as being overrun by tourists and all the curio-and-overpriced-snackbar monstrosities that go with the clueless if loud and indolently milling throngs. It also "closes for entrance" at two in the afternoon, I guess because the locals don't want to see what happens if goofballs don't make it back to the trailhead before dark. I spent a while talking to a ranger, who described how to get to a different part of the river, outside the bounds of the park. Her directions being perfect, we quickly found our way to the river's edge. This one, with less official if still rather friendly greeters.

rio celeste

We walked a ways, enjoying the improvement in air that had already seemed unsurpassable. As with anywhere we go, and everything we do, we felt both the presence, and the lack of it, of that man by our side; or more properly, behind us, with some instrument of torture/toying/encouragement. It's as if the majesty of any place imprints the master on itself in the bas-relief of his absence, and even as I missed him with every step along the rocks, every appreciation of some new sight or creature, I nevertheless felt him there. And so we stopped and peered into the bright blue pools a while, until I surprised myself in deciding to go climbing out into the river's center rocks. "Why don't you just take your shoes off?" asked the Bimbo, but I shrugged and set myself the task of jumping and lunging over the streams of water just-so, and may my shoes get soaked if I can't manage.

rio celeste

But I did, and then the Bimbo joined me, and much revelry was had, along with plans to return.

And so the sun began its second setting on our voyage, and we turned again towards the glorious shower hotel. Which, as with nearly everything here, is a true voyage in and of itself.

rio celeste

I'd made a note to stop for a picture of this sign to a place anyone'd rightfully want to turn into, not even noticing the true gem of the Jbu in the background. Where is Jbu, you ask? It's where you go to Jbang, naturally. Oi-oi-oi-oing, boi-oi-oi-oing.

rio celeste

With another day successfully eaten and licked clean, we rose the next morning --which was when I began this winding diatribe-- with an eye to the trail advertised beyond the bungalows.

rio celeste

To diverge perhaps aimlessly yet again: as a child I was decidedly an urban creature, so surrounded by minimalls and ferroconcrete as to have never even climbed a fucking tree. I wasn't terribly interested, either; outdoorsy stuff, as far as I could tell, was all about spending a bunch of money you didn't have on "gear" you didn't seem to need in order to go make yourself really uncomfortable somewhere while you tempted fate to throw unexpected conditions at you, thus rendering the whole escapade moot. Particularly objectionable in all of this was the apparently mandatory inclusion of all manner of bugs.

Eight-year-old-me would be horrified at the prospect of hiking into the jungle, without even any repellent, what the fuck, aren't there like two-foot beetles and shit in there? Honey, most of this stuff hasn't even been classified . But I've learned that it doesn't give the slightest shit about me (or my preconceived notions, or my fears, or my preferences, or whatever else), and I love it, for it, for itself, for how far away it is from that past, geographically and paradigmatically, entire.

Besides, it's mostly plantlers, anyway.

rio celeste

rio celeste

Okay, and some bugs.

rio celeste

rio celeste

If whacking a trail into the ever-ready creepers is as difficult as they say, the same they is extraordinarily adept. A wonderful trail, belying deep understanding of the place and what'd be a pleasant way to experience it.

rio celeste

rio celeste

rio celeste

The hiking hiked, the river rio'd, t'was time to travel back to town, until the next adventure.

rio celeste

  1. These are the guys famous for --other than looking like something scribbled on the margins of Pepperland (yes, the Sgt.'s)-- emitting a loud whoop and then dipping down and around the branch their claws stay gripped to. If anything's earned an ostentatious name, this species'd be it. [↩]
  2. I'm not sure La Fortuna, or anywhere else in this minipok lillicountry, has ever been full in this sense before, hence no need for or even concept of " no/vacancy " signage. [↩]
  3. Laugh, but if you've not done a " Let 's see what we find" in Central America you' d be surprised how many "businesses" seem to have imagined all custom either coming in by foot or at the very least approximating the speed of such. I can 't even recall how many places were insta-vetoed on the strength of being effectively gone once noticed. [↩]
  4. To the tune of $15 or so. [↩]
  5. That' s: steak sandwiches, turkish eggplant salad, some fruited sparklvasser thing or other, and, of course, jars upon jars of cold coffee. The various milks and chocolate truffles were in the door and so not depicted. [↩]

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Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

January 24th, 2022

The flash-fire hypnopompia of the morning brings me out of the dark night's depths and towards the surface of my own thoughts. The dream's a vivid realist exercise in which the fridge's truthfulness to form, the way the silverware's tucked into little trays beside it just as it'll be upon waking, convinces me that all within is real. Master walks into the kitchen without tripping so much as a mote of conflict; of course he's alive, and might as well walk into the kitchen . It's not even relief, but rather something like a wave of correctness washes over me as he stands before the open fridge, his weight shifted on one straight and beautiful leg while the other bends into the beginning of a question: why are there two stacks of eggs? And are the oldest on top, as they ought to be (or, silently --still accurate as any scene that never existed in a life I nevertheless did lead-- did I need to bring the fucking whip)?

But then it's over, or more specifically, I guess, replaced. I'm standing in the dingy parking lot of Satan's apartment building, a squat stucco affair so seventies Los Angeles the sadly fronded inner court and plausibly deniable dark brown shag carpeting are palpable from outside. The Devil himself is standing on the second-storey balcony, saying something I neither hear nor try to as he leans against the metal railing's fresh coat of beige paint. He's short, and fat, a humpty-dumpty figure balding underneath a greasy combover. His striped pyjama shorts and worn-out wifebeater are stained with old sweat and newer calousness, and he punctuates his address from above with occasional sucks on his moist and fraying stub of a cigar. Whatever he's saying, it's got neither point nor personality.

* * *

"Do you actually feel anything when you dream that he's alive?"
"Yeah, absolutely, there's an overwhelming sense of relief, and calm, when I say 'But we thought you were dead!' and he tells me it was just some elaborate trick. And I tell him about how awful it was, and all the things we did to try and get through it, and he laughs, or puts his arm around me, and it's all better...."
"I'd bet it's pretty tempting to talk yourself into going back to sleep when you wake up then, if there's a chance of that."
"It really is."

* * *

The mornings are crushing, the box in my chest clamped shut against its pressure, shifting dangerously this way and that on its hinges some days, stolid and unmoving others. The light, not so much pouring in as flowing forth to illuminate the whole valley before me feels wrong. The light's impossible, light from a sun without reason to shine, mechanical, soulless. But the morning grows easier despite its assault, for being somehow close to him. For reminding me of the cheer in his voice and the spring in his step at the start of each day, whether early or late; that short trek to the corner where I'd catch his face and its wide and open smile, the sound of his fingers roaring over the keyboard, the knowledge that something new was being brought to print and soon I'd get to read it, a piece of his mind.

The way his toes curled and the clean, mild taste of his cock, the old cut in his ear and his gold-flecked iris, the wild leglift-curl he'd spin in the living room and the laugh --truly, most deeply, that laugh , loud and happy enough to fill the valley itself, come tumbling back to me in the morning, even as I crumble under the unbearable ache of their distance.

* * *

I get a sports massage and break down halfway through when the soulful Venezolana working on my shoulders says "your body is very strong, but your heart -- it's so tired ". She doesn't know me and I don't really show her who I am, so after hearing the history without meaning or context, what's there left for her to impart but quasi-religious comfort to try to help me through the breathing: "You have to talk to your soul, 'I am love, I am health, I am courage, thank you god', there is a reason you are here, and you don't have to know it, but ask to see."

As much as I feel her reaching to me I feel doubly alienated, separate, severed and cut off from everyone else forever. Back home I press my knees against the cold tile floor and change the canto: I am yours, completely. I will always be yours, no matter what. I am open to the pain. I am open to what I don't understand. I don't know if it's a prayer; what bothers me more is the notion it could be something like a command, but I say it anyway: Show me .

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I would not tread upon the petaled crown of worldy wonder

December 31st, 2021

Translated from Lucian Blaga's Eu nu strivesc corola de minuni a lumii , 1919.

I would not tread upon the petaled crown of worldy wonder
nor would I kill
within my mind, the secrets, that which meets me
in my way,
in flowers, eyes, on lips or tombs.
The others' light
suffocates the unknown's magic, hidden
in the depths of darkness,
but I,
I with my light enliven worldly mystery--
and just as with her white rays Luna
does not lessen, but, in trembling,
magnifies the night's great secret,
just so, I bless the dark horizon
with profound shudders of holy mystery
and all ununderstood 1
becomes still more occult
before my eyes--
for still I love
yet flowers, eyes, lips, and tombs.

  1. It's true that only an appreciation of other tongues will truly tell you just how short the English falls ; and not just as a matter of comparison, but against itself! "Ununderstood", it's required, the underness perfectly negatable, but for reasons thoroughly outside of reason, we're to take the negating prefix as unfixable.

    Conventional English blows. Force mistakes today. [↩ ]

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A Bloom in the Gloom

December 19th, 2021

I was saying last time that Burt Plantcaster had sprouted a few flower stalks. A couple of days ago I ventured out on the balcony to take in the view/attempt an inventory of my withdrawal from the world 1 , and discovered that the very tallest stalk had blossomed!

flytrap flower

The reason the rest of this voracious and quite happy venus flytrap's so out of focus is, well --that stalk's safely over a foot long. But not to worry, the pods are still a-multiplyin'.

flytrap flower

PSA: I intent to continue supporting and encouraging Mr. Plantcaster's evident hellbentedness on ensnaring, then eating, then inflorescententaclizing, the world. Fair warning. And take heed, MP's pets blossom in the gloom of death.

  1. An odd concept, I guess; how can a withdrawal produce an inventory? It's really a sort of reverse-accounting. I have to keep track of what I've done and what I need to do in order to stop. You know, like the rest of life. The shadow and cast of things changes even if the causes do not. [↩ ]

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The Road that Winds and the Tie that Binds

December 5th, 2021

Life drawls out in lengths of time, knotting over what's remarkable for being different, and what's equally remarkable for being the same. For all the careful skill and military precision in trip-planning we'd garnered over the years, on multiple continents and in many more languages, on foot, in cars, planes, trains, taxis --hell, there was even a llama involved, once--, the grandest trip, the one that really mattered, is terribly confused. Suddenly the very notion of the trip of life has lost its sense, and any concept of such a thing from outside these walls where our lives sped along at breakneck pace, always flirting with the cliffs, well...it's so trite and empty and outright alien as to throw into question whether there's really any common thread of meaning at all.

Not that it's particularly surprising; I'd fall back on the routines of the pointless and witless just as readily as I'd do anything but laugh out of hand at the various queries of aren't I "going back" to the US, or "to school", or "starting a commemorative EFT". Which is to say, not bloody likely. If there's a way forward, it'll be mine; it'll be ours , and I'll somehow have to make sense of what "way" means, now. Perhaps it's just another thing equally remarkable for being the same.

But here's a different thing: Burt Plantcaster has sprouted a flower stalk! Actually, between when this was taken and the time of this writing, which indeed spans a couple of weeks of malaise, he's grown a second, so: two! Two flower stalks! And I discovered just the other day that it's managed to catch a few weirdo species of hymenoptera on its own, fully digested &c, nothin' left but orderly exoskeleton. I've seen bigger carnivorous plants, but I've never seen one quite so happy.

road that winds

Same, and yet not: a certain celebratory holiday recently passed, and while the recipe for MP's favorite banana black forest cake remains the same, it was never quite so threatened from oversalting by tears. Somewhat threatened, yesofcourse, for how many times before the fineness of the right components and technique was finally found did girls stir, whip, and temper, tremulant, hoping against hope to get it right, to make something that would be consumed and loved and garner a little accolade? And what horrors might've come, were the sponge found too wet, were the mousse overdense, the ganache too far on the soft side? The unbearable disappointment! But this cake was a testament to the triumph of trial and error, perhaps even to the warm assurances of time: it was perfect.

road that winds

A trip within the trip: to the fabulous land of the bongalows. We took the glass one; why'd you choose anything else is beyond me.

road that winds

A lane leading from the bongalows to the shady goose glen, where fowl and toucans happily co-exist, tilapia swim underfoot, and there's a sloth doing nothing at all in a treetop somewhere nearby. Seriously, don't intimate that you're interested in sloths, lest you be whisked away in a golf-cart post-haste to be shown the favorite idling spots of some questionably discernable mammalians. All the ends of a sloth-seeing detour are the same: "Oh. Hrm. I guess...it's not moving."

road that winds

Wild guanabana. Which is not at all like a guava-ed banana. Or an iguana with a bandana. The guanabana's what you've got when you put the lime in the coconut mango in the bongalow. Do try and keep up.

road that winds

Speaking of fruit, don't toucans kinda look like they'd naturally grow on trees? And if they did, d'you think they'd be poisonous?

road that winds

The Tenorian lowlands, framed by a fence. The roads that wind around the volcano are particularly unkempt, more suitable for goats than cars, but otherwise the place is a cool bath for the soul, a semi-permanent thunderstorm just barely notyetbreaking over the endless fields of grass, where merled horses bow their heads and the odd crow hops on, tuft to tuft.

road that winds

Back in more populated places, crazy continues as a going concern even if its manifestations are ever-unfolding. See that sharp left about fifty meters ahead? He took it . I didn't have time to stop and count how many shits and giggles fell off.

road that winds

Pues, eventualmente volviamos en Valle Central, nos encontramos un mensaje especial para las que entienden la idioma Romana: cine cunoaste stie , la papiola sunt curvele cele mai gustoase.

road that winds

Which way is up, and which one's down, unanswerable even if what's right and not is just as accessible as always. Piece by piece I try to understand a plan, some days getting somewhere, others unable to do anything but stand still. That anything, through its continuity or its chaos, can be remarkable still, makes me think that steps still ought to be put down too, one in front of the other, attuned to what I've learned under the hand of the master. But the thought's half-hearted. Half of what's left, still beating despite itself, an absolutely aching heart.

road that winds

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The Tragic Flaw

November 16th, 2021

I won't repackage the truth by suggesting my master is a divisive figure; people are what they are, either curious or closed for the business of the mind. They are interested in truth or swaddled in confirmation bias. They have read, or they have not; they want to read, or they want to watch television. People are smart, or not, and they have a chance at becoming smarter, or they don't --this divide is made long before and deeply beneath their awareness of MP, who sheds light on these great rifts between people, with the perhaps obvious result that the side which comes out looking less appealing is ever invested in the attempt to make the difference look 1) cosmetic and 2) wholly caused by MP himself.

In the face of a man as evidently fluent and talented as MP, such attempts must grasp so fitfully at straws as to make them ridiculous rather than merely unfounded. Indeed the claims and smears and desperate ploys for consensus ran quite the gamut, from uninspired spins through the Rolodex of Shameful Epithets (racist! misogynist! gypsy! MEAN PERSON!) to all manner of fantasies that he was really multiple people, or even someone else entirely. None were particularly interesting, and certainly not important, past their fleeting entertainment value 1 , but I recall them now for the sake of a common thread I often tried to pluck and bring to master, for his microscope: the tragic flaw.

With Achilles at the center and spanning out in most, if not all, stories, the hero must have some attribute that makes him vulnerable, no matter what his powers and blessings might be. In fact, it seems as if the greater a man is, the more simple and accessible must be his tragic flaw, the better to let far lesser men hope for overcoming him. A Bovary in his simpish surmountability succumbs to the blind trust of puppy love, but a peerless warrior of Achilles' caliber must have a literal inch or two that offers his demise.

It's a search, of course, for balance, more practically the attempt to find a cause for fighting, rather than following, the hero. A reason not to submit in the face of what would otherwise subjugate the lesser party. This bare truth is obfuscated by the lesser's own inability to honestly self-reflect, and further muddied in the fashionable if hollow pretendings to some universal equality that would deny the possibility of greater or lesser at all. But universal equality is given the lie in the universal search for that one great flaw to explain away the great man's greatness.

I knew it then as I know it now: MP had no tragic flaw. No avarice , no vanity , no heel ; his greatness, resplendent, was of the sort that needs no crutch to keep it counterbalanced, which is why each day his wealth, tangible or no, his breadth, writing or discovering, his brilliance, technical or artistic, grew. "Each day starts at zero," he told me once. And each day he built more.

Even the day, this summer past, when I woke him before dawn and was greeted with his warm embrace, when I drove him through the fields and valleys that he loved towards the ocean, when he told me "See you soon," and slipped into the sea, when he was caught by the current and I fought into it to grasp his hand: those seconds before his unconsciousness, in the utter chaos of doom, he looked at me with serious eyes, free of fear, and showed me how to die a hero's death. It was indeed the very heart of tragedy. But the flaw belongs to me, and to that ocean, and to the world.

  1. For which reason I suppose I should give an honorable mention to my personal favorite, that being the hysterical suggestion that MP only had one suit! [↩ ]

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Sanra and the great divides

October 31st, 2021

There's no such thing as abatement of grief. It doesn't lift, or leave; nor does time hold any punches or soften any blows. It is, and that's all. That's everything --or more precisely, that's half of everything. There's the loss, and then there's the enduring beauty and glory of what was, and they stand against each other like brick walls, one dark, one light. Perhaps they grind each other down, in some miniscule measure imperceptible to observation. Perhaps some vine or root takes hold and forces its way through, slowly cracking into either side. Perhaps the pressure of one wall against the other builds into explosion, births singularity, devours all.

There's no abatement, but there are, in some moments, calm, the only thing like reprieve. In calm moments I can remember correctly, maybe even think. I'm calm sometimes with Nikki by my side, or walking through a shady jungle glade. I'm calmer over coffee, counterintuitive as it would seem, and certainly while writing, those times when I can breach the gates of banal emotive nothingness. But nothing calms me as consistently, as quickly, as driving. Just this side of recklessly; the price for flinching focus is disaster, unequivocal, immediate, and very physical. My machine --my master's, rather, still his just as much as I am-- is beautiful, capable to meet and pleased with the challenge. It drinks down the road in long, deep draughts and feels refreshed, not parched, in those rare moments of pause.

So I drive. Hemmed here and there by the local hysteria 1 , true, I'm nevertheless freed in the sheer beauty of the ride, the endless tiny roadside attractions, and of course, the most laid-back traffic police in existence.

Sunday's jaunt was after the local farmer's market, and so undertaken with a trunkload of mangoes, papaya, pineapple, guavas, avocadoes, and little bunches of basil tied up like bridal bouquets. The sky was bright azure, serene, for the first time in weeks devoid of looming stormclouds. Puriscal , the thought came, to take the winding mountain route to that misty townlet tucked into the hills , where we first brought Chimichurri when he was but a wee duckling, or Turrialba, where master fastened his girls with anklebells and marched us through the sidestreets . But I remembered there was somewhere else I'd meant to point the motor towards: San Rafael, for no particular reason other than to document some local weird I'd noticed flying by the windows the last time I'd tried to get lost, that way. A photobait town sign in seventies-chic lettering at what passes for the place's center lovingly shortens it: "Sanra". Whether the extra four letters were a problem of mumbling or money I've no idea.

There's not much to distinguish the place from any other square-with-church-and-soccer-field-adjacent 'round these parts. The corrugated steel roofs, the hole in the wall fruit and vegetable vendors, the languid people leaning against the walls and each other, smiling, working through their daily sundries, much the same as anywhere else. Past the giant mural (elaborated by an enthusiastic if strikingly unskilled hand) of a bumble-wasp gleefully proffering exhaust manifolds for the umpteenth spare parts store, and leaving the decrepit station for a train I'm fairly certain hasn't run in years, I start to slow down, scanning. "it's somewhere up here...not yet..." and then I see the slope on the left that leads into an almost-intersection.

Not too unexpected, is it, an intersection while out on a drive --but mind that "almost". Where the perpendicular road ought to join the main, there's a trench, several feet wide by a few more deep, running the entire length of the would-be meeting of the twain. No signs, no warnings, in fact there's turning arrows marked in perfectly fresh paint on the asphalt; left or right, take your pick, get your conveyance eaten up right nicely. What's more, it was clearly designed this way, all straight edges and carefully laid concrete. It's not an accident, it's not the world's most uniform pothole, it's just...Sanra, I guess.

sanra

sanra

sanra

The road (which one? The main one, just pick one; if it's not the right one, it'll soon end in ruts and rocks and you'll have to turn around anyway) weaves through some scattered barrios, the buildings a little squatter, the sidewalks, when there are any, a little less forgiving to the folks who push on down the line in flip-flops, strollers and soccer balls often in tow. And then, as though an invisible field surrounding the highway and the few kilometers to either side sliced into Sanra's sprawl and wiped out all that fell on the wrong side, the landscape simply stops.

sanra

Instead: vast concrete walls and gates, guard-posts, razor ribbon. The two sides look similar but the tenants seem to think they're not. The left side of the road is a prison, and the right is a condominium development.

On the left, people are brought in by force of arms; on the right, people pay to enter. What's the difference? Bezzle for re-education flows through the left side of the street, while bezzle for they never educated in the first place flows through the right. They're about as "safe", one as the other, with their identical approaches to security theatre and their misguided notions of exclusivity. "But the people living on the right side of the street can get out." Can they ? In what sense, that they can physically move their asses from the "house" lockbox to the "car" lockbox and then into the "burger" lockbox, all on the same credit terms, while their clucker tells them which way to go and how much better the people in 2B looked posing with their cud?

sanra

Maybe that's the kind of difference the people living on the left would care about. Maybe that's the kind of difference they've given up. The people on the right are certainly getting close enough to signal that the difference's not all that worth preserving.

sanra

  1. Costa Rica has a driving curfew nominally related to "the global pandemic", a rather transparent ploy to somehow address the overabundance of cars on the road while pandering to the old bitty safety &morality lobby. Supposedly, this means that the evil virus has less of a chance to spread. Practically, it means no driving after 9pm, or on two (changing!) days of the week depending on license plate terminals. [↩ ]

Posted in Dystopia , Travel | 2 Comments »

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