Do Re Mi Mene Tekel Et Cetera

If you spend enough time in a foreign place, things start to seem less foreign. The people on the corner look back at you with a glossed over, pseudo-familiarity. Every door you enter is no longer passed through for the first time, but for the 10th or the 100th time.. Those who were once charicatures, that is fit snuggly into a single phrase (the man with tomatoes or the woman from whom I bought granola) acrue complexity as our interactions diversify and distinguish themselves from the environment, no longer merely a piece the whole but an entity all their own.

Thus this is my last entry. I am about to start classes and I continue searching ardently for work. Both these things require ample time studying and practicing spanish. I can no longer devote so much time to writing in english, at least for a time.

-Bourcard

When I Have Fears That I Might Cease To Be

I read recently that sleep deprivation can lead to 20% more forgetfulness than normal levels. I have not slept properly for days, staying up 'til 2a.m. reading, getting up for water, laying with my eyes shut, wondering what Restless Leg Syndrome feels like, resolving to drink a lot less coffee. As a consequence of this unusual schedule and confirmation of the recent study from Ambien University, I forgot my father's birthday. What shame!

Sticking to what I can remember, I recently rode a bus from Tabay to Mérida. It was full upon boarding and the driver seemed curious, as we stopped en route to gather more sardines, exactly how many people the bus could contain. I stood in the middle of the bus, jotting notes about the people in a tiny notebook I keep in my bag. Here are some direct transcriptions from the notebook (libreta):

"Gentleman with mustaches ride the bus and talk of nonsense."
"I imagine this would be a perfect place for a sword-fight"
"Possible names for a novel: (left blank)"
"contemplate the hat of that skinny man."

I do love riding the bus for the freedom it offers the the active mind. While the drunkards squeeze together and speak of nonsense, the sixteen-year-old parents rock their baby, and the girls of the same age scratch their nose with superbly long fake nails extending from their phalanges, the gringo excitedly wrote down everything he was seeing.

Surrounded by strangers, each person serves as a stereotype. The complexity of the world is diminished when you can look at the man whose neck hair spills down below his collar and judge him correctly as a drunk, or assume the teenage girl with make-up is precocious, for she is holding a baby. I have always loved strangers for their simplicity and their anonymity. They are the only people who behave as if you weren't there. I applaud their negligence and respond with rapt attention.

Whatever You Do, Do Not Allow This Man To Sleep

I am alone, once again in the house of Mariherminia. There is a particular room that overlooks the valley of the river Chama where the vegetation creeps up to the door, like a nightmare of a flood except the plants and not the water are rising. Not far towards the Southwest, one of Mérida's three bridges, recently painted horrendous colors that make the 70"s seem modest, crosses the Valley. It is the place where, lazily spraying shaving cream out the window, I accidently drenched a motorcyclist speeding between lines of traffic. The cyclist slowed and wiped of the cream from the front of his shirt. Lea and Mariherminia, in the front, startled and asking why I was swearing and sparing with an invisible partner, thrusting my fists into thin air as if I were preparing for a boxing match. "Shit." I said, "I just sprayed a motorcyclist with shaving cream!" I continued pumping my fists as Lea laughed and Mariherminia seemed surprisingly calm considering at any moment a pair of thugish men would come tapping on the window with a hand gun or a tire iron. They did not come back to seek revenge, I imgaine because they could not have identified with any certaintly the car responsible. Little did they know, they need only find the person that had lowered himself in the back seat, half brought to tears, sparing with an invisible partner.

The Suffering of Change and Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918

The household has slowly dwindled in number. The daughters of Mariherminia have returned to their stations, Lea to Miami, Francesca to Caracas, Laura to Tabay, and I have had my first taste of living alone in Mérida with my grandmother’s cousin. Our first moment was a bit cliché like the overwrought moment in a poorly made romantic comedy when the unlikely couple sense the first intimations of their future as they touch hands reaching for the last french-fry. Our moment took place some days ago. We were alone, for Lea was not home (likely at the clinic next door getting a shot of Vitamin B complex in her buttocks).  The house was quite and with very little conversation, Mariherminia and I prepared dinner. I made a salad with a dressing made from French Dijon mustard, a fact that Mariherminia wasted no time in reminding me made it very expensive. She heated up a pot of lentils. We worked with our backs to one another. I focused on my task, while she focused on hers. Suddenly, we finished preparing and sat down at the table, blinking dumbly as the light over the kitchen table wobbled innocently from side to side. Our solitude had caught us both by surprise, and we each paused before eating to peer at the other. In this moment, we judged and measured each other. She wondered how she had found herself with an American man eating at a table that had been hers alone for more than a decade. “Dear me.” I could see her brain working, “How often will I need to place down the toilet seat? What will happen when he eats all the food? How many years will this rapscallionacious youngster take off my life? Will I have to teach him how to use the bidet?”  In the dim light, she took her first timid bite of lentil soup and emitted the faintest of giggles. “I believe we are going to develop a very good friendship.” She said.

In our Casablanca-esque moment, I would have run around screaming with joy, if I had not expected a reproach for doing so. In the nakedness of being alone with Mariherminia, I realized I must, once again build a lifestyle subject to scrutiny, and she too saw our lives beginning to intertwine and the inevitability of our knowing more about the other than we had thought. Though apprehensive of what might come, Mariherminia, the woman that asks me daily if I could please not forget to put on deodorant and who considers improperly washed dishes a sin against god, threw caution to the wind and nodded her approval as we sat below the wobbling kitchen light timidly eating lentil soup. 

  

Frase Del Día: No le para bola
It took a few days for me to learn this phrase that I had initially believed to mean something that is used to augment the size of a man's penis. The saying actually means, “ pay no attention to him.” It was finally engrained properly when Lea and I were driving through El Centro of Mérida, and she laughed loudly with no reason. I asked what had induced her sudden outburst of mirth and she replied that a man on the street had said “no para bola  tu papa nunca”, or “Pay no heed to your papa". I silently agreed, yet continued to wonder what point had the man reached in his conversation that called for such a statement: “Why wouldn’t you want to place a rat and a lobster in a closed box and see what happens? After all, you should never listen to what your papa would say.”

Mérida: Home of Heladería Coromoto and Teleférico, Respective Holders of World Record for Most Ice Cream Flavors and Highest Clable Car

The sound of Jackals picking apart a carcass floats in through the bedroom window. A group of dogs are tearing, with frightening proximity, into the trash outside, and I can them dragging plastic containers across the pavement with a ghoulish rattle. Their desperate, gluttonous growls remind me, not of the kind-looking, timid creatures I see in the daytime, but of a deformed, pitiful devils with sagging breasts, mange and crooked spines. I actually don't see why they're fighting. In Mérida, there is a feud between the sanitation workers and the goverment, and disposable trash (pun intended) sits waiting on most every corner. Mérida was once the cleanest city in Venezuela, but now, driving in front of the densely packed ranchos (favelas), a bags run the length of the neighborhood. Everyday in Caracas I saw people in government garb cleaning the streets, and still it was dirty. Here, hundreds of miles from the federal governments buttressed abode, there is less  impetus for  beautification. Old advertisements stick to the sidewalk like papier-måche. Plastic cups and cutlery are scatter at base of each metal trash can. These features, however, hardly define the city. Sure, some buildings may seem like ramparts and new is not the norm. Yet as I approach El Centro (downtown) my imagination soars as the exhausted "keh-puah" and rattle of buses fill the air. While some complain of the city's deterioration, I revel in its rawness. The stained walls of buildings are not flaws but ancient book ends that may yield a quadrillion undiscovered fictions, the bottles a testament to the happy drunkards that huddle in the street outside the licorerías.

I rode one of the city buses today after searching for work at nearby language schools where they offered me a starting pay of ~90¢ per hour (which includes the extra 10¢/hr in a food stipend from the federal government). To shake the idea of such an atrocious salary, I rode to the Mercado Principal.  El Mercado is a four-floor, indoor bazaar, packed with sellers of salt-cod and tropical fruits, maracas, clothes, nuts, and anchovies . The floors are cement and the ceiling, hidden by the hanging wares, seems to hardly exist. I bought tomatoes and potatoes from a lazy-lidded man whose careless grumble left me guessing his prices, yogurt from a woman younger than I that called me "amor", and an empanada from a booth that had the milky-blue eyeballs of a cow floating in vat atop the counter.

Acting as a symbol of my time in Venezuela, the bus ride back was jolting. We, like the Knight Bus, squeezed magically into miniscule gaps in the traffic, slammed the brakes when the car in front stopped, and while the bus driver sang along with tacky love songs, I realized I was not even on the right bus to get back home. As I started my long walk towards the house, I undoubtedly loved my burdensome bags I won in a fearful struggle against the hurdles presented as a foreigner in a foreign city. I feel the same as the dogs outside that have fallen silent, whose messy struggle led to a full belly and absolute contentment.

Frase Del Día: Provocar
Everyday I could use this phrase, "Me provoca Helado", "Me provoca una cervecita" "me provoca toda la comida del mundo". That is to say "I am craving" a hundred things and always must resist, at least some of the time.

Quizás, Quizás, Quizás #2

Quizás, Quizás, Quizás

I woke to the timid voice of Marihermina, coaxing me from a dream where I was being chased by a dog. "Piero is en-route to Zea" she told me, "and he will be here in 20 minutes". I was drinking Coffee and reading Hojas de Hierba when Piero arrived with his son Pietro, and we set off, with the company of David, to the town of Zea (~2.5 hours). We were traveling to Zea to learn how to make Miche, an liquor andina with taste of ouzo and the alcohol content of aguardiente.

In the front seat, David and Piero argued the politics of a potential coup d'etat, and I happily named the dates of every Venezuelan golpe de estado I could remember (1945, 1948, 1957, 1958, 1992, 2001). David, a romantic in all ways, spoke of the heart of the revolution, and the burgeoning spirtuality of the Venezuelan youth that back the Bolivarian Revolution. Piero, who at 75 was more than twice the age of David, was less optimistic and less abstract. While David was bouncing with excitement at each thought, Piero was almost stereotypical in his miserly dismissals David's youthful optimism.

In the twenty minutes of listening to their chatter, I had passed, unnoticed, from the green hills of Mérida to the bare cliffs (barrancos) and cacti to the West. All was orange except the river banks that bloomed with a perfect single-file line of bananas and, where it widened, with sugar cane that was being piled into the back of a truck. On each side of the road sheer rock and dirt stood ominously over the road, and ever hill bore the marks of erosion.

And we returned, just as quickly, into greenery, the conversation turning to the effects of MDMT, LSD, marijuanna, and a slew of other elicit substances. We passed  Cows that grazed the river banks and the mountains were covered with crops on 30 degree slopes. I stuck my head out the window and heard the dried grass rustle in the wind from our car. All was well when we arrived at the site of Miche elaboración (please see pictures for actual details, I am tired of writing and the others are waiting patiently for my return)

Frase Del Día: Piel de Gallina
It may come as a surprise, but I have used it many times here in Mérida. It is as it looks... "goose-bumps"