Trick or treat? Or not.

Granted, I have no children. This places me solidly in the spectator box when it comes to child-rearing, but I noticed a pattern when asking friends if they would be giving out candy to kids this year:

I'm gonna be bold and suggest that if we're worried about
violence and kids, maybe allow the trick or treating, but cut
back on the stabbed-in-the-head costumes?

“We don’t get them in my neighborhood.” Not a pattern, really, more of a uniform chorus of the same sentence. So...where have all the kiddies gone?

“Our neighborhood is full of kids. We see them come out of their houses in full costumes and we get the candy ready, then they get in cars and drive to the mall.”

Wh- Wh- What? The mall?!? Wh- Why? (In my opinion, kids should never be allowed to go to the damn mall, but that’s just me.)

“They do their trick-or-treating at school. People come in, set up a trunk or a table, and pass out candy there.”

Th- Th- That’s not trick-or-treating! That’s grocery shopping.

Why the shift? I feel like in the 80s we were plenty scared of kidnappers, razor blades and poison in candy (the latter of which has never happened, by the way), not to mention ample cause to bemoan, in our pre-adolescent voices, the reflective tape totally messing up our costumes! We’re gonna stay on the sidewalk, mom, there are no cars there! Gawd!

But we went. And we had a barge-load of fun every year. Running door to door, swapping insider tips with friends met along the way as to who as giving out the best stuff, and mapping out the neighborhood in your mind for optimal candy-ation. I would not be surprised to learn that whoever created mapquest was inspired by childhood candy-mapping.

“Skip the one-sided cul-de-sac, it’s not cost effective!”

It seems sad to me that people are so scared of each other these days that we’ve taken this experience away from our kids, especially given that we actually live in the safest time in human history, it’s just that we also live in an age tragically miseducated by the 24 hour news cycle. (Note, that US media article still manages to focus on violence. But unless you think your kid is at risk of engaging in a holy war, the Brits were a little more on track.)

But as I mentioned, I ain’t got none of them little critters, so I don’t really get to talk.

Well. There is one. A certain four year old, whose continued well-being feels like arguably the single most important task of the planet today… Would I want him trick-or-treating? The answer?

Shit yes! He’s going to LOVE it!

But then again, he lives in a small town, and has two responsible parents to chaperon his tiny Iron Man butt.

Big city? Packs of kids wandering loose? Would I want him in one of those in a few years? I….don’t know.

What about you? (Vote in the poll on the vagabondurgres.com version of this blog.)

How long until that grows out?

I got The Haircut again.

The ancient barber chair in Nyaung Shwe

In Nicaragua, Morocco, and Myanmar I liked it, described it as “Much lighter, now I won’t sweat so much” and “my tiny shampoo bottle will last longer.” Here, it’s more “I am applying for the job of Faceless Peon in the soulless depths of your accounting corporation” and “you can call me Penis Head.”

Maybe my standards are just too high now. After all, in those places, I was just happy I could describe The Haircut without a shared language: point at the sides and back of the head while making buzzing noises, point at the top and hold thumb and forefinger an inch apart, and any peluquero or barberji will know what you mean. Gracias, shokran, and chezu tinbade.

Whereas here, I got demanding. “Can you leave the top long, and just thin out or trim the sides and back so it’s not so shaggy?” We differed in our interpretations of that request, the hair butcher and I. I was thinking “dignified, adult, but still warm for winter.” She was chuckling “White boy gonna look like one big boring peepee.”

The bridge in Frankfurt, where I spent an inordinate
amount of time listening to Elliot Smith

Was it my imagination that people on BART were less friendly after my cranial misdecoration? No one wanting to talk to the guy with the dickhead haircut? Or was it a vibrational consequence of an afternoon reading journals from my first awkward days abroad? Either way, I felt sweaty when I got off the train.

But riding home was restorative, as always. The music in my ears was still perfect, my friend the night heron was perched in hunch-shouldered brooding on his normal set of buoys in Lake Merritt, and the night air felt perfect on my naked neck, dumbass hairchop or not.

And it made me realize one other thing. One other priority. One you can perhaps help me with:

Anybody know a Halloween costume I could pull off, one that includes a hat of some sort?

I don't know who he is, but I like his style. (Thank you, google image search.)

Mercurial madness, retrograde riots

Congratulations, my friends. We survived another one. In that last post, I said something about the sun waiting in line for its macchiato on Mercury. Luckily for all of us, I was just going for the alliteration, because if it really had been on that erstwhile planet, there would have been no dawn that day, the sun arriving late, unable to call and tell us why, all its plans gone out of orbit.

Frickin Mercury, man. Always going retrograde.

Problems with communication and travel?
Signs might as well be in Icelandic then.

I don’t know a whole Hecate of a lot about astrology, but I have learned, the hard way, that when Mercury goes retrograde, maybe three times per year and lasting about three weeks each time, everything goes heels over head. These f’ed up weeks are characterized by miscommunication, transportation screwups, and plans generally going awry.

Do not sign contracts when Mercury is retrograde, cuz you’re misreading the fine print. Don’t buy new gadgets or appliances, cuz they’re going to have problems. And just to be safe, don’t travel, or try to talk to people. Just don’t leave your house. Be a Hermes Hermit.

Miscommunication and travel problems? Mercury Retrogrades are nature’s way of beating up on travel writers, since otherwise that life is absolutely as glorious as one would think it is if they’ve never tried it. Good thing I reapportioned my wordly ambitions, but those weeks are a good time to hunker down and just survive anyway. Batten the hatches, matey.

This year, the first day of the retrograde announced its arrival by putting my phone in airplane mode in the middle of the night, assisting me in missing plans to ride across the Bay Bridge with a friend. The next weekend a guy’s camping trip was weaned down to two of us by transportation and communication problems, that week an epic miscommunicationfest sent a friendship off the rails, a sister returning to Holland had all flights delayed, and bus irregularities abounded, making me late for appointments twice in three days.

I admit, I’m always 5-10 minutes late, but these times it wasn’t my fault. *shakes fist at the heavens*

I was going to use a photo of Mercury from Rome, but my
external hard drive isn't working right, so here's Ephesus
looking confused. Is it tomorrow yet?

It’s useful to know when Mercury’s gone bass-ackwards again. When the bus driver pulled up to the stop, turned the sign to “Out of Service” and said “I got an accident back there” with a thumb jerk over his shoulder, while everyone gushed out of the bus like explosive diarrhea, I didn’t have to ask for the nasty details, I could just shake my head, mutter “Mercury retrograde” and adjust my expectations. Arriving an hour late is still arriving.

I adjusted them further when my ipod decided to auto-erase all my songs and podcasts, leaving me auditorily at the mercy of the girl watching endless youtube videos about make-up products and how, like, totally amazing and stuff they are? Did I mention that technology doesn’t work well during a retrograde? I found sanity through the incorruptible goodness of a book until I arrived at the train station, where I took out the computer to investigate the ipod...and found that the computer had broken too.

Books books books! I frickin love books! No wiring no software no chicanery books!

But now we can all breathe a sigh of relief: it’s over. Or so say certain communications that traveled to me…

Wait. That’s an awkward sentence. Poorly communicated. Let me double check...damnit!

Mercury is in retrograde for one more day. Hold on. It’ll be over soon.

Informative, sleepy, exciting. And a little bit disgusting.

Trust me, this is as close as you want to get to
images of tonsiloliths.

Those gross little white things that you spit up from the back of your throat from time to time, the squishy stinky ones you hide and forget? Those are called tonsiloliths. If you google them, do not look at the images.They are accretions of bacteria and “material” that gather in the crevices of your tonsils, aka “tonsil crypts”, and do indeed give you bad breath.

A tonsilolith the size of Gibraltar was there to greet me this morning, when I woke while my alarm still slept, not yet snoozing. The sun was still waiting for its macchiato on Mercury, but the freeway a block from my bed was its usual constant current of cars crammed into commuter constipation. Only in the dryest of the unpopulated hours, 3:47 AM or so, does the engine population dwindle to the point that you can distinguish the approaches from the departures.

Should I get up? My bladder said yes, but skin hiding under the blanket said no. It’s getting cold already. Upper 50s, even. Yes, I’m aware that’s ridiculous to complain about, and no, I’m not bragging. I just don’t want to wear pajamas.

A compromise? Lay here and organize the day? Then I will feign surprise when I realize that my droopy eyes have let sleep rematerialize…

To Do Today: Laundry (droop). Work (some sparkle?). Reschedule Wednesday’s appointment (droop). Sneak my accumulated compost shrapnel into the neighbor’s greenwaste bin tonight, for collection tomorrow, since my building’s managers won’t spring for our own (droop).

Then it happened. Like a tonsilolith accreted from sheer joy exploding from a tonsillar crypt: buy a plane ticket today?

My lady and I fully intend to spend New Year’s overseas at this turning of the calendar, and it’s past time to choose a destination. Uruguay, cutting across the NE corner of Argentina to explore Paraguay came right to mind. Oooooh.

And the Philippines have been ringing their bells for attention for quite some time. Oooooh.

And if those airfares are prohibitive, I have somehow not yet explored Oaxaca, closer at hand in Mexico. Oooooh.

But when the word Cambodia surfaced in conversation, she grabbed it with the urgency with which you eject a tonsilolith in the morning. Oooooh-wee!

Perhaps we’ll let the airlines vote with their prices. Perhaps we’ll let you vote. Where should we distinguish between the departure of the old year and the arrival of the new one?

(Vote in the poll on the wordpress version of the blog: here.)

Hemoglobin, non-terrorism, and adorable despite a little racism; in Panama City

Arterial roadways and Panama City

I was a happy little red blood cell. Biding my time before entering the veins of Venezuela, I was promenading through the pulse of Panama, crossing arterial roadways to meander beside the lymphatic mud flats of the capital’s southern, maybe eastern, western-ocean-facing harbor. It’s a tidal maelstrom of a place, Panama City. Currents of South America hit the breakwater of Northern dominance, while the West Indies just try to get through to reach the Orient.

"A great friend of Panama"
statue was downtown until
it was damaged in a protest.

And I was just another particle, a nutrient perhaps, life-giving at best, parasitic in the end, and enjoying the ride in the meantime. Franklin Delano Roosevelt surprised me, baptized in pigeon shit, cracked by revolution, and now exiled by urban planners to a scenic and irrelevant perch between oncoming and outgoing traffic.

The floatable tools of tenuous livelihoods were stranded in the muck of low-tide, pretty and hideous, colorful and infinitely drab, appealing to my eye but forbidden to my camera in this post 9/11 world, where armed guards were too bored to acknowledge me, but their supervisor, obliged by rank, called me back from lens distance. “Why are you taking pictures of the harbor?”

Panama City harbor at low tide

“Cuz it’s pretty.” Did not satisfy him. So I pointed out the circles of oil drums against the linear wanderings of boat hulls, the prehistoric muck of the ages patiently reclaiming the trappings of modern conceit, the camaraderie of hulls at rest.

He waved me away. A nearby Rastafarian found the show hilarious, and called me over. His skunky smell and laugh-lined eyes made me feel at home, though most of his words were unintelligible. I’m pretty sure we agreed that nowadays people take themselves too seriously. He’s my friend.

Playground they were ignoring

It was too early in the trip for loneliness; I was still lubricated by the renewed flow of travel vivacity in my veins, jolly in my joints, melancholy unable to find a place to oxidize. This made it easy to dance with the kids, finding joy for themselves aside from the paternal provisions of playground planners. These kids had too much swing in their steps to need swingsets for their butts.

“Hello!” They cried like seagulls as I approached. “Hello! Hello!” Then in the precision of classroom lessons transferred to the real world, word by word, they added “Where. Are. You from?” Laughter as punctuation.

My Panamanian pals of the promenade

I answered, and as politeness decrees, returned the question. “We are Panameños!” replied a big voice from a small body. “Except him” and a tiny finger pointed to the boy in the blue shirt. “He is African.”

A glance at the face above the stylish blue collar showed this was not true, was not welcome, was another incidence of the scraping search for understanding of childhood, accidentally abrasive, sharp with the latent racism of Latin America. The boy in blue hid most of his reaction well. It’s probably not the first time.

What do you say? How do you push back, perhaps instruct, be a nutrient and not a parasite? Tiny feet were ready to run off again, my seconds clicking short. “I’m African too” was my best try. This paused their feet. Is the gringo crazy?

“I am African. So are you. We all came from Africa.” I’d neglected to pack my notes on the migration patterns of early humans, but I dare to remember a slight smile on a darker skinned face, and there was no malice in the laughter of any.

They held the pose for 1/32nd of a second

Besides, more important concerns were on hand. Namely, a request for a co-photo so vulnerable, so tender and murmured that it very nearly broke me with its innocence.

Race relations, cultural exchange, personal evolution. Nascent love. We’re all doing the best we can, for ourselves and for each other.

What would you have said, in the face of a child’s unhateful brushes with the legacy of inequality?

To speak or not to speak?

The young woman was determined to be heard. She had the sort of volume that can only be achieved through a combination of theater training, ample quantities of alcohol in the recent past, and an unquestionable confidence in the righteousness of her every word.

“Straight white men should not be allowed to speak” she stated, at eardrum cracking amplitude. “And putting on Shakespeare is just listening to another straight white man.”

We were backstage at Cal Shakes, the beautiful outdoor theater in Orinda where friend and savant Mike Daisey had just given another of his brilliant monologues, this time combining personal revelations, cultural insights, and a powerfully lucid vision of Hamlet.

I’ve been to two of his shows, was blown away both times, and hanging out afterwards, have witnessed the consequence of his provocative monologues, namely that everyone comes up to him after the show and inflicts their own monologues on him. The exhausted man sits and endures speech after speech with grace and good humor. It’s a second impressive performance.

But last Friday the diatribe being shout-talked into the ear drums of every human in the room (and possum, raccoon, and sleeping raven in the woods outside) came from this young lady, swaying moderately, Racer 5 beer tipping up in hand, and opinions crashing around the room like a demolition derby.

We’d communally decided that theater is a medium for a cultural discussion about the rights, roles, and purpose of people (or something like that) when she informed us that straight white men should be allowed no voice in the conversation.

Don’t get me wrong, I know what she means. Here in the West we dwell in the aftereffects of centuries of straight white men screwing things up royally, in a cavalcade of crap, storms of stupidity, avalanches of assholery. It is well past, centuries past, the time when a broader spectrum of voices needs to gain power in our dialogues...all of them.

But NO role? NO voice? Is that the way forward? Should I be bound and gagged because of the skin, anatomy, and sexual preference I was accidentally born into, to pay the penance earned by my pigment predecessors? Is retribution of discrimination the best way forward?

Or is there some way we can take the former criminal class, and let them help drive the progress? Let’s ask Iceland and Suriname.

Those two antipodal countries recently announced an upcoming U.N. panel on gender equality...to which only men and boys will be invited. More oppression? More uninclusive dialogue? Or do, perhaps, straight white men have a role to play?

Do you agree with my opinionated friend and straight white men should bow out (or be forced out), or do straight white men have a responsibility to be involved in advancing equality?

Lumps of love, transmitted by wire.

My headphones endorsed the errand by playing the perfect cycling songs as I pedaled downtown to the bank, Toots Thielemans’ “Bossa Nova” gliding right on into Johnny Cash’s “Hey Porter”. We had account data scribbled on an envelope in my pocket, five hundred of your dollars lurking around the ether somewhere reachable, and the perfect cure for a morning of mental mud washing the blech off my spirit.

A venomous dose of intimidation, and a steaming and stanking dollop of why-bother, were little piles of self doubt scat on my shoulders when I started, but they dried in the sunlight, weakened in the rushing air, and were scoured away by the wash of your generosity. I had money to pass on.

I have yet to master bicycling photography, and banks just
ain't pretty, so here's a couple more from the community
center where Alvaro volunteers.

Byzantine bank protocols were navigated with an easy smile nourished by the kindness of the 13 of you who had donated to help rebuild Alvaro's home, to find the best way to send every cent. No one takes cash anymore, but it turns out the best way is still to physically walk a money order down the block.

Colleagues from my Venezuela delegation and others, family, friends, and names I didn't recognize arrived in my inbox over the last week, all stepping up to help put a roof back over a family. The bank teller may have been bored, but I wasn’t.

(The sense of wellbeing y’all gave me endured, kicking the doors off the hinges of the Oakland Parking Citations Assistance Center, and I was the happiest person ever to wait in line to pay an exorbitant parking ticket. Confused the bejeebus out of the clerk.)

Stub of the most satisfying money order in history tucked into my notebook, I grinned my way around the jetstreams of Oakland, the morning’s sick inefficacy forgotten, feeling the flow, reflecting the rhythm. And no one seemed to mind a good mood, especially the woman who honked and waved while her laughter escaped the cracked window when my stoplight dance included a little traffic direction. (John Legend’s “Stereo” just wanted me to tell the turn lane when it was their turn).

Three of five delegates, dancers, musicians, and a magician

My feet were still drumming the earth when I arrived home just now, and what did I find? Two more donors, another lump of love to send Alvaro’s way. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to go back and do it again tomorrow.

(If you’d like to add to that errand, the fundraising page is still alive and dancing:  http://www.gofundme.com/AHomeForAlvaro)

(And since Tuesday’s blog pushed ahead of this one, I can update that to FIVE more donors, almost doubling our amount raised, bringing us within $50 of halfway. I’m going to need to charge my ipod for this…)

Why bother blogging?

I'm supposed to be writing a blog right now. Instead, I'm pretending to type while observing the hunched man across the communal table, who looks like Lewis Black fallen on hard times. His hair is greasy and thinning, spots on his amorphous button-up shirt, and a stained paper coffeecup close at hand, even though we're sitting in the coffeeshop.

He looks like a scientist who's spent too much time in the lab. He looks like the parents' least favorite bus driver. He looks like a calm madman, glaring at his crotch as if it holds the answer, and occasionally starting sentences like “I don't know why...” and “It would work if...” but never finishing them, just exploding in sighs and more staring.

Coffee, words, and a postre in El Salvador

Now from his lap he takes a clump of papers, green ink notes and revisions. He's a writer. Of course he's a writer. Crapola. It feels like A Christmas Carol, and he's the Ghost of Careers future. Why would I want to do that? A writer friend’s words come stabbing up from where they lodged in my ear: “You’re young enough, have you considered getting out of this bullshit profession before it’s too late?” Yes I have. Regularly.

Today is just one of those days. When everything is...just not...doable. I picked up the weights for my wee morning exercise, and...put them down again. Once doesn't count. Crunches are usually the easy part, but I lay down on K's old yoga mat and just...lay there. Feeling heavy. One, two. Three. So heavy. Breakfast happened. Cereal. The only crunching I'll do today.

Pollo and palabras in Peru

I should work on something more substantive, but the thought runs rancid in my stomach. Okay, let’s start with a blog. But here I am, almost five years into blogging, aware that whether I spend all day or twenty minutes producing a post, it will debut in a mild spasm of links and email notifications, then live maybe six hours before it withers, fossilized under a layer of sandwich instagrams.

Every now and then I get a notification of a comment in an old blog, and feel a spark of joy: those words live! Then I read the comment and find only google translated spam from accounts with names like Acne Scar Removal and Cheap Nike Air Max.

Havana lunch

(My personal favorite: “Thanks so much and I am taking a look forward to touch you.”)

So when I got a comment last night for a 2012 post about an orphanage in Ecuador, (link) I assumed it was just another spammer. But no! A real human read the post and now wanted to visit Hogar Para Todos. I emailed them the contact info, thinking Now that was a blog worth posting. It got information about something good out to more good people. That is what these e-things are supposed to do.

So that’s one. Then I noticed that one of y'all precious long-time readers had liked nine of my posts in a row. And the best part? The time-stamps showed that she actually read them. And to put frosting on the awesome: she donated to Alvaro's fund at the end of it. Another blog worth posting...

Journaling with mysterious food in Kuala Lampur

And I realized one other thing while rereading the blog about the orphanage. It’s...not great. Not awful, but...I’d write it differently today. So? So I’m not taking an MFA program, and haven’t been able to rummage up a writing group around here, but regular blogging does seem to be having an effect on helping me put words together. Given the more substantial project I’m working on, that alone is reason to continue.

So if old posts might come around the mountain (riding six white horses) and inspire someone in some way...

And if new posts might hold the attentions of other interesting people...

And if the blogging itself helps my main project...

But there's one other important factor: do I enjoy this?

Cai, diary, and Turkish breakfast in Fethiye

Well. My coffee's gone, but a vague smile remains. And somehow I don’t feel quite as heavy as I did this morning... I think I'll keep doing this. And, to help myself and my regular readers, I’m adjusting my posting intentions to every Tuesday and Friday.

And poor tortured Lewis? He never did finish one of those sentences, but when he left a minute ago, there was a certain giddyup in his gait, the ebullience of a man enjoying his life. Maybe this word-stuff isn’t so bad after all, at least, not once you get going.

See you on Friday, when I’ll tell you about the more uplifting rest of the day.

Ample? Fat? Or something more creative?

“What about this one? How does it look?” His girlfriend considered for a moment, head tilted to the side and lips pursed just a little.

“I like it, the color is good on you, but you need another size.” The shirt was stretched over his broad chest, and ample frame. This is Venezuela, the land of thick, doughy arepas for breakfast and afternoon snacks, and the man’s intellectual career has him sitting in board rooms and at conference tables around the country. “You need size…”

She turned to search for a larger shirt, but the man shopping next to them was more...helpful.

“You need size half-a-cow” he offered.

This is Venezuela, one of those countries that does not mince words. Whereas I might be left grasping for politely indicative words like “ample”, in Venezuela? They don’t mess around.

The question of which way is better is one for the sages, bores, and dorm room floors, but one thing is for sure: if you’re going to live in a place that’s this direct, you’d better have a good sense of humor.

Luckily for my Venezuelan friend of the substantive girth, he has no problem laughing at himself, and neither does Alvaro, my friend and the program director of the Witness for Peace Southwest delegation that brought me to the country.

But Alvaro is no half-a-cow. What would they hang a nickname on, then? The bushy eyebrows? I am sensitive about that one, after years of people telling me I look angry, when actually I’m just ⅛ Neanderthal. But no, it’s not the brows that the man on the steps of the Cathedral commented on.

At five foot and a few, Alvaro comes up to my shoulder. I always like people who do that, especially after living near Holland, habitat of the humongous. Indigenous people throughout Latin America are frequently vertically modest, but Venezuela is predominantly mestizo, ie descendants of Europeans, with Amerindians making up only 2% of the population.

So Alvaro is short. And the man on the steps noticed. He also noticed the calm confidence and knowledge with which Alvaro was conducting us around Caracas, and he had a question.

“Oye, bonsai Tarzan, which way to the metro?”

Bonsai Tarzan. That is quite an image. Not one that every altitudinally modest individual might appreciate. Alvaro politely gave the man directions, and off we all went on our days.

Note: Last weekend Alvaro’s house suddenly collapsed. Luckily no one was hurt, but he, his wife, and their five year old daughter are now homeless. I cannot imagine what this would be like. I set up a fundraising page here, and urge you to contribute, even just a few dollars, if you can.

Thank you.