Babble-on

What impels you to become a taxista or combi driver in a city where the streets are so clogged by traffic that a two-mile trip, at peak hours, can be accomplished as quickly on foot as in carro? When typical cab fare is little more than $1, and a combi ride comes out to $0.30, but you have to pay gas prices easily as high as those back in the US? If you're the snatch-a-gringo-and-leave-'em-naked-on-the-outskirts type of unregistered cabbie, I gotcha; I mean, that's what I'm considering doing, too, once this job's up. Otherwise, isn't this a losing proposition?
And that's saying nothing of the actual driving conditions. Roads with potholes big enough to hide hibernating bears/potato-plumped Peruvian señoras? One-car-wide two-way streets? Cars turning from the middle lane as the norm? Combis slamming on brakes and veering across four lanes to pick up the S/.8 fare? If not for traffic's snail's pace the roads would be littered with twisted metal and blood-slicks, the dancing shadows of the vultures circling overhead.
Traffic cops seem to exist, though, for all they do, they could just as easily be crazies celebrating Halloween yearlong.
To avoid the frustration of being trapped in traffic while a legless man propped on a skateboard pulls himself down the sidewalk, I walk when I can. Which, combined with the fact that fresh food and controlled portions obviously don't provide the calories I need to maintain what was already a low weight, has led to my skeletalization. I'm down something like 13 pounds in the two months I've been in Perú. To be honest, this is not a new phenomenon; every time I've travelled Latin America I've hemorrhaged weight, in the process becoming something of a celebrity/mythical figure for those who witness the binging I have to undertake in order to slow my disappearing act. I'm back to eating at least 1,500 calories daily of supplemental junk -- chifles, heavily-salted and lightly spiced fried plantain chips; hunks of layer cakes; ice cream; cookies, two to four packs at a time; chicharrónes, baring my teeth at any waiter who dares try to clear my plate before I've forced down every gelatinous, inch-thick cube of (sometimes still hair-adorned) deep-fried fat and pig-skin.
Tangential food insertion: there are few things as fun as peeling back the skin from a fried guinea pig's face and tearing little pockets of meat from its cheeks to torture anyone who can't quite believe that their favorite childhood pet is a delicacy on the far side of the equator.
The Davidson group is good. Busy doesn't begin to describe our lives, from el jefe to me to the kids -- oh, the kids, with their classes and homework and weekly meetings and internships and clubs and, wait, that's right, social lives too! -- but they keep smiling, we keep smiling, even if sometimes those smiles are halfway-hijacked by diarrheaic grimaces. It's so cute, all these grotesque contortions of happiness, kids learning the importance of always, always stuffing a fistful of wadded toilet paper into their back pockets before heading out.
And what's a bit of foreign travel without love? I was recently informed by a girl, then reminded through a daily barrage of uncontested phone calls and text messages, that she needed to see me because she had a message she could only deliver in person. She said it wasn't love or pregnancy (had the latter been the case I'd probably have converted to religion, seeing as how that'd imply my having magical powers and other such biblical awesomeness). At that point I realized the message is to be buried deep into my heart -- delivered on the obsessively-sharpened tip of a switchblade. Taking a lesson from Omar (I'm re-watching The Wire), I've taken to stuffing my shirt with phonebooks every time I venture outside of my barred-and-locked domicile. (As a friend pointed out, Kevlar could likely be procured at the local black market, but I need to save my nuevos soles! See, I've already put in an "order" for an iPhone 4S, detailing to my "procurer" the daily routines of several locals spotted flaunting the device I so desire.)
Ah, but love. Sane love. When it invariably arises in daily encounters with random people or moms-eager-to-be-grandmas that I'm 28 and unmarried, and that yes, I'm unmarried by choice, not because I offed my wife, I have to offer a tension-and-confusion diffusing "Pues, ando buscando el amor/mi Peruanita." And their sweet reactions make me cackle inside as I go back to drooling over the endless parade of raven-haired señoritas teetering down the sidewalk on heels.
With all the barking dogs and earthquakes, early-risers and whistle-happy neighborhood watchmen, I wouldn't call myself desperate to add another sleep-disrupting variable to my life. A live in food-preparer might be favorable, but it's not quite an unbearable inconvenience to cross the street to receive meals from the sweet señora who cooks my food. And, while it'd be nice to have my clothes hand-washed on command, I packed enough to survive with just two hand-washings weekly. Geez, I've just gotten used to living hard, you know what I mean?
I need to die in these streets, because I don't know how I'm going to go back to living any other way.