It took someone seven months to write...this?

So, it turns out volcano climbing isn't something you just do.  Hey, y'all, let's go scale that steep 6,000 meter loose-rock-and-ice-covered behemoth this weekend, how's that sound?

Nah. C'mon now.

I get all these lil jellyroll-gobblers waddling up to me, having heard I've spent several of the last few weekends attempting to summit Arequipa's looming shade-purveyors, showering me with crumbs while proclaiming, "Oh, I can't wait to climb Chachani or Misti or whatever other earth-bumps the Andes have to offer."  As we part I enjoy them resuming their struggle, which is to say moving; and best when they're going to attempt a flight of stairs, because the ratio of stairs-taken to desperate-rail-grasps-while-collapsing-to-knees-and-wailing tends to hover in the vicinity of 2:1.

...

Or so began a post I started writing back in June 2012.  But, as usual, something distracted me for the next six or seven months, and now I'm left with an introduction to a story -- a great story, truth be told -- that I no longer wish to develop, if only because I've rehashed it repeatedly, orally, with all my co-sufferers and our friends and, occasionally, some inebriated coed in some dingy bar because exoticism is that seductive hook that'll convince her to ignore all the misgivings her friends wish and pray and text that she'd heed.  In the interest of that sexy mood I'll conveniently leave out the portions involving vomiting and shitting behind boulders and burying soiled paper in the snow inside of a majestic, ice-enveloped volcanic crater, relics for future civilizations to uncover once all Perú's mummified ancients have been unearthed.

Ah, 2012.  The (first) year I got paid to work abroad, part of a group that quickly grew into one of my most cherished collectives of friends; individually, without exception, people whose presence and friendship can't be ascribed a finite worth.  Reflecting on that period of my life, those trying and rewarding and exhausting and invigorating and busy and beautiful six months in Perú, glazes my face with a euphoric daydreaminess that probably makes mothers hug their children closer and bemoan in whisper pressed to a loved one's cheek our decaying society, bolting their doors and medicine cabinets behind them.

And 2012 was the year I stumbled into monogamy, holding down a wonderful relationship with a truly peerless woman, a relationship that revealed a sweet character I'd kept suppressed through a half-decade-plus of practiced commitment avoidance and emotional self-nuetering, a relationship that survived for some indeterminable but lengthy-ish period before it disintegrated on the strength of me being me: careless; clumsy; destructive; stubborn; unsympathetic.  It turns out family are the only ones who have to tolerate you being a dick, and that's only because they figure they're stuck with you forever anyway.


“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.” - Edgar Allan Poe*

I wish my cell phone and computer had text-and-email disabling breathalyzers attached.  And that someone would invent a device that could similarly detect emotional instability.  I'd have been saved that Oh. Fuck. Ing. Shit. moment when I clicked into my Sent Mail folder looking for an unrelated message and noticed a two-week-long binge of unidirectional harassment that made me realize that she, my ex, had saved my reputation and employability by never requesting a restraining order.  Shit's silly, y'all.   However, chaos has reaffirmed there's a fine distinction between regrettable and regret.  My past months are littered with divisive moments that can be characterized as nothing if not regrettable (and, mercifully, interspersed with even more moments of epiphany and triumph and success).  But these moments are enlightening, instructive in ways that theory and conceptualization, for the less clever of us, never can be.  Simple speculation can't impact the simple mind with the deftness of the brutal explosion, something that leaves wounds leaking and shrapnel embedded. This essential learning, no matter how violently uncomfortable it is to acquire, is impossible to regret. This is progress, these painful lurches forward.  I wish I didn't leave so many casualties in my wake. I think I just wrote my first emo song.

It would've been helpful to begin dating before the age of 28, to learn a few lessons about relationships and selflessness and, as an added bonus, to avoid a few of those STD scares. That I'm 29 and miraculously clean says nothing about me exercising discretion in selecting partners.  But it probably confirms I have at least one super-power, which is damn cool.  Only I'm unconvinced that boasting of my absolute imperviousness to other people's genital armageddon is going to coax any intelligent, worthwhile women back to my floorbound-mattress.  But there is the dual-headed shower working in my favor...



*Thanks to mi amorcita Hallie for publicizing on facebook this decidedly apropos Poe quote.

The Kids are A'ight

I'm regressing. Social networks are killing me. Fewer words, please, and more pictures. Preferably of your cute, of-age sister...who I sure hope is too tech-dumb to elevate her security settings. The most consecutive letters I lay down these days are in the form of plays in Words With Friends. I recently completed a volcano hike so brutal there were times I hoped the ghetto-rigging of my shoelace-repaired crampon would fail and hurtle me down the ice-swath to my death, or that a boulder dislodged in our reckless descent would cleanly decapitate me.  But I survived and had to settle for a(n admittedly delicious) smoothie, because microbrews don't exist in Perú. I wrote my parents a disjointed ramble about the experience, which I'll spare anyone reading this blog.  (Though it bears mentioning that Joe's at-the-time unfortunate-sounding quip in Bolivia, describing his level of comfortability with our group -- "Know why I love our group? Because I can shit in front of our girls." -- proved prophetic and uncannily precise.)  The masochist in me decided, the day after vowing to never again so much as mention the V-word, that I needed another climb. And next time something taller, maybe icier.

Despite the fact that writing inexplicably became for me, sometime in the last few years, an emotionless task, I can confirm I love my life in Arequipa, Perú, that I'm neither depressed nor emotionally-neutered, that only my fingers bleed banality. I smile almost constantly, a stream of drool ornamenting that gaping grin every time I traverse my favorite streets, gauntlets of chicharronerías where all passing life is bathed in the gloriously oppressive stench of chicharrones, those succulent hunks of mostly-dehaired cross-sections of pig, dangly, deep fried globs of skin and fat with occasional bites of muscle mixed in.

The students I work with are -- for lack of creativity and vocabulary we'll opt for some of the least descriptive and most overused adjectives, foregoing the anecdotes that would require sentences -- beautiful; intelligent; humble; generous; inspiring.  They've avoided kidnapper cabbies and pregnancies and arrest, even as they give me fits with untimely injuries and illnesses and a general disregard for the whereabouts of their cellphones and deadlines and the contents of their inboxes.  Minor quibbles, really.  Short of a Weird Science scenario playing out I, honestly, couldn't ask for a more delightful group of minions.  Nah, nix that.  These kids -- shit, adults, huh? -- are more impressively, wonderfully multidimensional and interesting than anything I'd dream up (especially since I'm pretty sure my dreams extend no further than a set of measurements and perfect skin-tone).  I'll make it a point to tell them so in less effusive terms, flashing a thumbs up or extending a fist for bump and muttering something like, "Y'all a'ight." (Quickly coughing afterward, for the added layer of confusion, protecting that carefully cultivated misanthropic facade.)

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.

This is all you get for a while.

I shouldn't be writing here.  I know, for the sake of my professional self, I shouldn't heed the nagging requests of those who've earned the right to nag -- friends, ex-coworkers, the like; my family, concerned that I maintain employment so I won't be crashing on their couches the rest of my life, have remained dutifully silent.  

Closet-Ids, lusting, hedonistic creatures who masquerade as upstanding citizens, shouldn't blog.  They should hit the bar with those closest friends and evacuate their perverted recesses.  Binge and purge.  A blog, to those swelling, pulsing with inappropriateness, who fancy themselves mildly clever, is the hot pinprick to the throbbing thumbnail recently hammered.  What screams forth will stain.

Eh, but what's protecting my reputation?  I'll be smeared across the pavement sometime soon anyway, some hairs or teeth or fingernails fender-snared souvenirs for the taxi-driving author of my hit-and-run.  The pretty blond girl kneeling beside the crumpled me won't realize for years that she's the reason the speeding driver never even noticed the dark-haired, moderately-tanned giant trying to dodge traffic.  And nobody will ever know if  it was a rush of testosterone that propelled me onto the highway, or if the sun-warmed-since-dawn head cheese sandwich I purchased from the lady with the salmonella-crusted fingernails was the impetus.  (But, hey, eating street food lends a certain credibility, an inalienable authenticity, to traveling, because nothing's realer than dysentery, nothing's cooler than cholera.)

So, we'll back it up a few months.  Last August I returned to Nicaragua for three weeks, visiting friends, reacquainting myself with vos, and ogling every nica I judged to be eighteen or older, so mostly the already pregnant and/or married.

A few months back in the US was all I could handle, so after Thanksgiving I flew down to murder-capitals Guatemala and El Salvador.  In Antigua, Guatemala I spotted an appropriately disheveled homeless man slumped into a urine stained and scented corner, his shirt reading, "Más vale bolo famoso que alcohólico anónimo."  In San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, I realized that the smacking sound that emanates from every single Guatemalan household, every single day around lunchtime has nothing to do with an insatiable midday horniness -- this is no concert of balls slapping -- but rather with that ubiquitous mealtime staple, the tortilla (which is prepared fresh and in infinite quantities for lunch, and then recycled at dinner and the next morning's breakfast, after which the cycle begins anew).

In Playa el Tunco, El Salvador, while I gauged the time of day by the number of popsicles I'd yet eaten, volunteered at a local orphanage, and spent my free minutes devouring pupusas like any addict who knows he'll be divorced from his love for the foreseeable future, a Salvadoran friend of friends, an artist, was gunned down in San Salvador.

Back at Charlotte-Douglass International Airport, walking through the terminal toward baggage claim, I passed the line of posters commemorating all the classic cinema filmed in the area.  Shallow Hal, for example.  When it took me fifteen confused seconds to realize the racing movie wasn't pronounced [dah’-lay] (as in dale, pues) but rather Dale, as in Dale Earnhardt, I realized I already felt out of place.

Luckily, months prior, Davidson College had fulfilled a dream -- offering me the opportunity to work with its inquisitive, inspiring and unfailingly quirky students, under the supervision of a renowned professor/political scientist, while living in the beautiful, climatically-perfect city of Arequipa, Perú, all the while being paid in dólares!

So that's where you find me now.  A few months deep into working in Perú.  The rainy season has passed, which means that the stench of sewage no longer pervades the avenues in the late afternoons, the roads no longer converting daily to shin-deep conveyers of rain-diluted waste from higher-ground reservoirs; all river-spanning bridges are open again, and the road is no longer an unpredictably-cratered, vehicle-disabling landscape rived anew by each day's downpour.  And though the ceiling of my apartment now bears yellowed, dining table-sized splotches of water damage, paint flakes and particles have mostly ceased to snow down; you can no longer appreciate fine powder ever so gently detaching from the ceiling if so much as massaged by a breath; exposed surfaces are no longer obscured beneath dusty accumulations through which you could finger-trace messages to be slowly but surely buried.  (And even though non-experts assured me that the paint probably wasn't lead-based, it's nice no longer worrying that I might roll onto my back and breathe through a gaping mouth in my sleep.)

My apartment also features the world's first electric bucket shower.  I don't have real hot water, just the common-to-poorer-parts-of-Latin-America-standard electric shower head, that which sizzles as electricity heats the water that exits the wired attachment and sometimes gives you a little shock or, if you're tall and your head comes near the contraption, might trigger flashes of white behind your closed eyes.  My shower-head water heater trips the apartment's circuit if it's left running for more than a minute.  Which means I have to exit the shower, walk down the hall, and flip the switch if I want hot water.  And I want hot water.  Solution: shower in thirty second intervals, lathering or shampooing in between.  Somehow, probably due to the conditions to which I subjected myself during 18-months of backpacking, I find this more amusing than annoying.

That ability to find the humor in situations, to have patience, is something I developed, at least more fully developed, traveling.  There's a reason that my current boss' main concern, when contacting my professional references prior to my hiring, was that I would be able to laugh in and at any situation, no matter how stressful, how dire.

And so, instead of exasperation, I can only laugh when a Radio Shack employee, presumably someone semi-educated in things electronic, is adamant that 1080p is a higher definition than 1440p.  Or, later, when a group of Radio Shack employees try to explain to me that the "Grounded" light on my surge protector will only illuminate if the adaptor is placed atop (or, perhaps, buried in) dirt -- "Es que, pues, mira, gringo: 'ground' es tierra.  ¿No lo sabes?"

Everyday presents another opportunity to learn, to appreciate, to laugh.  Tomorrow I will begin the process of navigating legal channels to secure a falsified document.  I will have to pay legitimate doctors so they will record, officially, that a particular student suffers from allergies severe enough to prevent her from receiving a specific vaccine, proof of which is required for entry into an adjoining country we will visit.  Once it's been officially established that our student can't be vaccinated, I'll be able to request a falsified vaccination card, proof that our student received a vaccination never administered, so as to avoid the potential for any problems at the border crossing.

¡Viva el Perú! 


[I have no idea why the text color/background formatting is suddenly off.  Nor do I care to figure out why.]

Nuking my belly-buddy

Last night's post-supper gulp of gooey, neon Pepto-Bismol led to a startling realization: these post-meal, 15ml shots will be my daily dietary highlight as long as I'm mired in this parasitic, tummy-pet genocide.

Shit.

Doctors are contradicting each other, one saying fill my page of prescriptions, another declaring this one solo medication will suffice, and at a fraction of the price.  One advising I can eat only this and that, the other suggesting his counterpart is delusional and hyper-protective.  I just get mad at my murmuring stomach and start punching it with closed fists -- something I've secretly done for years while running, cursing with innocence-corrupting ferocity any cramp that dare pinch my side.  Neurotic would be the word.  Therapy might be the solution.

My belly-buddy, or at least he who has been detected, is but a protozoa, Blastocystis hominis.  Sometimes I like to imagine all my sincerity and reflective powers reside in my intestines, which is why I haven't written anything with any emotional resonance in many a month, if not longer.  But I can tell by my blog's three visitors-per-week average that the world is enamored by regular reports of my eating binges and stool consistency.

Let's hope volunteering, my looming change of agenda, has rehumanizing, reinvigorating side-effects.  In the meantime: do people ever start cutting out of pure, intense boredom, just to bleed some color into their lives? I...am....soooooooooooooooo bored.

The cheerful beckoning of stool sampling (Stool Sampler is officially my new DJ name)

It's difficult not to be petrified when you read words about parasites "making Swiss cheese" out of your organs, even if aforementioned ominous wording comes courtesy of promotional materials for an unapproved product manufactured in some guys garage, whose floods of advertising are likely quarantined in your email's Spam folder.

I'm convinced my intestinal ravager is gaining strength with every carb-heavy pile of lomo saltado, every liter of ice cream and quarter pay de limón, every ají-painted plateful of cow's heart and stomach.  Now that I think about it, I can feel the little buggers burrowing through my body, nibbling craters through all my major and essential organs, and working in shifts to scatter cysts from my liver to brain.

Looks like I better pad the wallet for the doc's inevitable impuesto gringo.

Watered-down drive-bys on the rise.

Chances are you don't know me, not really.  Not the hairtrigger temper hanging behind the smile, infamous for not unprovoked but certainly unmerited instances of spitting and slapping and headbutting and otherwise abhorrent behavior directed against friends and family.

I'm running toward Arequipa's Parque Selva Alegra when the occupants of a passing taxi expel an unidentified liquid that spatters my t-shirt.  The laughter emanating as the car slows to the stop sign wells my reason-and-consequence-blinding rage, a phenomenon of a violence and uncontrollability to shame anything portrayed in 28 Days Later.  A viscous retort is conjured from the back of my throat and I begin to duck to window-level, ready to Hulk it out with this car of four, when chance has it I actually glance at my shirt, noting the dispersion and consistency of can-fired shaving cream.  I play it off like a graceful stumble and continue pounding pavement.

It's only then I recall the characteristics of Carnaval-time in Arequipa, principally that presence in the streets is acquiescence to walking-target status for the water balloon- and pistol-toting youths prowling afoot and scouting passenger-side.  I can't help but chuckle as I halfheartedly try to sidestep the shrieking and beaming chiquitas chasing me through Alto Selva Alegre with their spilling buckets and bulging balloons and water bottles.  And my laughter trails the the hazard-flashing hooptie -- that already doused my stationary, stretching self as it pulled into the gas station a few hundred meters back -- that slows down to 6:30/mile pace so a cute Arequipeña can soak me close-range with a high-powered stream, then smile and wave without leaving her number.

Tomorrow, promises César, one of the owners of my Arequipa residence, La Posada Del Parque, we'll camp out on the third story patio and rain havoc upon unsuspecting pedestrians below.

Defining Zombification

Somehow I never noticed my short morning jaunt to Arequipa's Mercado San Camilo, my ritual Pie & Papaya Quest, is literally lined with belly-bulging prostitutes sporting far-from-form-flattering Skittle-colored Spandex.  "Ay, cariño!" Sultry faces, but no licking of the lips, a minor personal disappointment. "Uy, Papacito!" drawls one unconvincingly, as she extends an arm in my direction, so unenthusiastically that I'm unsure whether she's doing rotator-cuff rehabilitation or trying to grab a handful of my t-shirt.  Still, it's all the attention I'm lacking from gringo-magnet bricheras, thanks to my caramel complexion and decent handle on español.

Perusing the superlative travel blogs of a few Evanston universitarias, recently befriended over pocket-change cajitas de vino chileno, has at least momentarily reawakened the synapses between my inner-author and fingertips.  Ah, the familiar crunch of the keyboard, the furious and familiar pulse of the backspace, the conflict between my diminishing command of the English language and orthography.  And still it's a facade.  I've nothing to say.  Nothing to contribute.

Maybe volunteering is the answer, a month-long respite from the monotony of perpetual Saturday.  Zombification (n) 1. the framing of days around three meals, the height of mental stimulation waffling over which pastries will pave one's path to late-onset diabetes.

"I really think salsa's a bit like rape."

There's nothing like waking up hungover, slinking out of the hostel in search of market-vended, resaca-stifling morning pastries and empanadas, and catching a 10am proposition from a corner-lurking hooker, either working a double or monopolizing on the bust-a-quickie-on-the-way-to-work crowd: "Vamos al hotel?"  As they (should) say, the early puta gets the worm.

The last few weeks of my life have been perfectly, utterly unproductive, governed by nothing more than pastry and chifa cravings, and the drug-resistant bacterial menace raging in my intestines.  Which, I suppose, is a diagnosis better than pet belly worms, if less cute.

So I've compiled another impressive collection of pirated DVDs, worn all the tack off my $4 rubber basketball, and, immobilized by flojera -- not even Maya's likening of salsa dancing to rape has prodded this latent predator into prowling the discotecas -- made friends with the many cycling through my Lima and Arequipa, Peru hostels, accumulating amistades to house and entertain and guide me from Santiago to Buenos Aires.

Time to go scrub the cake and wine residue from my teeth. And see what a pocketful of jangling Peruvian soles might procure on the corner.

Make 'em say Ugggghhhhh

Probably a lot of things have happened since I last settled into an internet cafe to inform my tiny -- sounds better to say exclusive -- universe of readers. Hello again.

My final month in Peru found me switching back to checklist-traveler mode, ever-weary from an excess of night-bus cityhopping and Cuzco barhopping. Kibblets joined my great friend Blanca and me in Cuzco to complete an international supertrio of awesomeness. In 10 days we visited Machu Picchu and El Lago de Titicaca, nightstalked Cuzco's party strips exploiting our gringoness for pocketfuls of slips redeemable for "tragos gratis." We admired terrain and architecture. I passed on my addiction to Lomo Saltado. Images and moments were branded into memory.

• A traditionally-dressed middle-aged woman statued in the middle of a busy park, her colorful, ankle-length cloth-wrap nearly kissing the concrete, her punishable-in-public crime camouflaged by the section of sidewalk still darkened from a recent washing.
• A young girl defecating in a shallow gutter just outside a market entrance, a gutter that separates two ever-busy lanes of foot-traffic.
• Geometrically-challenged travelers on long-distance buses straining to stuff impossibly large packages and boxes and bags into already-overstuffed, to-the-eye obviously too-tiny spaces.
• The Juliaca, Peru mecca of cultured citizens: Licoreria Marihuana
• A lomo saltado dinner with a sides of "Why can't I look away?" and "This is a little uncomfortable," thanks to the mother in a family with whom Kerry and I were sharing a table at our packed-to-capacity Chifa joint.  "Hey, that's a big plate of Lomo.  And, whoa, one huge fuckin' titty."  Um, gross.

Especially memorable were a few actual meals.  First at the gringo-infrequented Cuzco eatery La Chamba, where hunks of animal that h'or d'oeuvre the portions you'd confront in any 60oz Texas Steakhouse Challenge run for less than $5.  The lechon, a juicy, fully-chicharróned baby pig accompanied by two papas del horno and one humita, was a portion that could feed two of me.  In other words, you and your extended family.   My blood-grease content hovered at triple-bypass for a few days after devouring my deliciously butchered piglet, thanks to slabs of fat as thick as thumbs that I couldn't leave on the plate.  Departing I a glance into the kitchen turned into a gaze, arrested by the pink and white kaleidoscope of muscle and fat.   Half-animal slabs were hung from hooks or spread across surfaces under the glistening blades of diligently hacking women.

I returned to Arequipa para despedirme a mis amigos.  And Blanca's family treated me to an essential traditional meal I'd theretofore avoided, Cuy.  Guinea pig.  Pet.  There's nothing like sitting down at a table and finding a dehaired pet stretched across your plate, oven-crisped legs in rigor mortis, long-teeth frozen in "Oh, shit.  They just snapped my neck!" paralysis.  And all I thought at every nibble: Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm.  Picking bits of meat and tendon from my teeth hours later, I couldn't stop thinking, "I've never liked pets.  But maybe I wouldn't mind porking up a few fat dogs or cats..."

Lima was fun again, spending my days with Cuzco-encountered friends Lizabel y Karla.  We ate chifa and perfectly-sculpted pay de limón, and consumed a season of Grey's Anatomy.

Yeah, I know.

Now I've been home for a few weeks.  Thanksgiving brought me home a month earlier than I'd originally planned, and now I'm billions of brain-cells nearer to constant gape-faced drooling.  As if Bell's Two Hearted Ale isn't self-murder motivation on its own, I hang with a crew of alcoholics.  Though I can't say chancing upon a Facebook message I'd mailed the late-night prior in a blackout haze wasn't hilarious reward enough to help me overlook the pulsing, pincushion's-worth of inner-skull needles and juicy stomach that characterized yesterday's 24 hours of hangover.

Well, let's say 12 -- it was probably noon before I sobered up.

(And you want photos, eh?  Then click here.)

Booger bombs and other details you don't wanna read.

Here in the Internet I just unglued a tumor-sized, sneeze-launched boogerbomb from my wrist. All of a sudden I'm being overwhelmed by oxygen.

Fast forward all the gooey, meaty meal details, pastries and rocoto relleno and queso helado, Halloween in Arequipa was quite the spectacle. Masses, costumed and not, overwhelmed roadways for kilometers radiating from city center by 5pm, ambling families passing thousands of logjammed taxis like Flash past the Blob. Nightfall transformed central Arequipa's streets into the practically inpenetrable liquor-numbed and unhurried human traffic jam that so excites pickpockets. Hanging out with the excellent crew of international and Arequipeño friends I've had the good fortune to amass, the rhyme and reason of alcoholic consumption was dictated not by any health-preserving riddles but what next found it's way into greedy fingers. Four hours of sleep was all the prospect of Sunday morning adobo afforded pitiful Pat, but that ruddy-broth-engulfed pork chop, with its boiled onions and hot peppers and pancito to soak up any spoon-escaping juice with its appetizing toplayer oil-spill sheen, was all glory, all the way to and through the messy, stomach-infuriating aftermath. (And walking through the more-than-usual urine-crusted streets this sunbaked morning, I realized that I'll have to rub all my future hardcopy photos in urine to impart them the "essence" of Latin America, for something more accurately approximating that full-sensory experience.)

Today was the important Latin celebration Día de los Muertos, which fills Latin cemetaries with thousands paying respects to those deceased, celebrating spirits with spirits, song, dance and picnics. Thousands of graves freshly cleaned, decorated with flowers and wreaths, the rampant jubilation, the myriad colors. The public intoxication. All unforgettable. (Though, as an afterthought, you should probably never visit a cemetary, much less on Day of the Dead, with a goth couple. For the gloomy and black-fishnetted, expressionless photoshoots in front of acceptably dreary graves and tombs never lose their novelty.)

Gotta stop writing and find a bathroom. So this entry doesn't really flow.

I'm still doing my best Jabba the Hut impersonation in Arequipa, feeling almost guilty for my utter lack of productivity, camped in front of the TV with a kilo of fruit and bag of pastries, while indigenous cleaning ladies teeter past, yanked side-to-side by sloshing buckets and vacuum cleaners, mops and brooms wedged in armpit crevices, short ladies smashed smushed further groundward by shoulder stacked linens; while rag-clothed chicle-vending kids swirl around me, mumbling pleas to fund a dinner of bread rolls or rice with downcast eyes, while I whistle the tune of post-rocoto relleno satiation, a sack of pastries swinging from fingertips. This accumulation of guilt demands that I bury myself in cakes and ceviches and platos tipicos Arequipeños, like queso helado, a thick and velvety custardish ice cream, and the aforementioned rocoto relleno, a steak, raisin and olive stuffed, cheese-covered red pepper accompanied by pastel de papa, cheesy potatoes.

My friend Manuel and I toured El Cañon de Colca, deeper than the Grand Canyon but mostly impressive for the giant Condors that soar up from the depths, enjoying the whole catered-to, high-class-tourist routine, all the while rabidly snapping hundreds of ultimately indistinguishable photos of deep crevices and climbing peaks.

Betrayed by overconfidence in my time- and non-use- deteriorated handle, I misdribbled the first $4 basketball I'd bought off a bridge into traffic before I'd ever had a chance to use it, this while crossing-over a ghost with all my tongue-wagging, shoulder-swiveling-swagger. Ball #2 is sticking closer and crushing all international ballers who challenge the gringo to games of 1v1. But chunks of rubber sole are tearing off my worn running shoes, so impending is a broken ankle or reliance on jump shots, in which case gracias por my gringo gigantism.

Yesterday I was called "respetuoso" by a cute Arequipeña I've been hanging out with the last few days. Obviously I'm doing something wrong. Though that gentleman will probably disappear tonight, Halloween, ushered into "borrar cinta" by tragos of Pisco and liters of watery lager.

Bringing Back the Devil.

Blah blah blah

It's become progressively more difficult to summon both the motivation and coherent and clever sentences to fill this journal. I imagine my boredom has sucked any previously existing entertainment value from my words as surely and thoroughly as my daily cake-train absorbs all the liquid in my guts.

This blog has devolved into a showcase of dessert-exploits. Yesterday I managed to squeeze in dessert after every meal. Each of the three, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. How fucking exciting. How cultural I've become, my view of Latin America two to three layers of bread and icing.

Trujillo boasts an impressive parks-per-square-kilometer ratio, plus it's inexpensive with good ceviche. Lima is one of the world's mega-metropolises that crawls out and over everything, from valley bottom to mountain top, like the God's of City Construction haphazardly flung fistfuls of city-sprouting gel from the heavens and let it splatter and sprout. Um, intelligent design? The tour of la Iglesia de San Francisco was the most fun I've ever had in church, the art and architecture and ancient library all spellbinding, but the thousands upon thousands of human bones held in the dreary catacombs beneath made the lasting impression: Circles of skulls stacked upon spiraling arrangements of femurs. You know you're on a good tour when you see a human skeleton and the guide says nonchalantely, over the group's oohing and ahhhing, "No es nada impresionanate. Vamos a ver muchos más huesos."

Arequipa is nice, and I've had the good fortune to make some American friends who love beer, burgers, and Appalachian accents. The homestay I was so anticipating proved underwhelming, and the "problem" with the cable -- HBO and Cinemax disppearing into fuzz both evenings of my stay despite crystal clear reception during the day -- suggested I might've settled with a family a godloaf too wholesome. When I presented to the family father my plan to leave the house for city center, he was alarmed by my choice of lodging, protesting my prospective residence on a street overrun by "prostitutas, delincuentes, y, Dios mío, ¡homosexuales!"

Thereby unwittingly solidifying my selection.