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.]

This and that

Relatively smooth sailing here in Cusco, Peru, my stormy stomach acids simmering significantly until they bubbled back today, thanks either to:

a) my inglorious late night return to street food -- two bun-sandwiched, paper thin, fifty-cent meat patties, stacked with french fries and probably contaminated "¿ensalada?", "Si, por favor (stack my burgers with tasteless, nutritionally-vacant iceberg lettuce, either unwashed or washed in contaminated water, thus the classic lose-lose proposition),

b) or my (Blue) Devil-fueled return to gettin'-my-guzzle-on, celebrating Duke's presence and later victory in the National Championship game with the alcoholic circuit, vino blanco to unas chelitas heladitas to Johnny Walker on the rocks and a Pisco Sour nightcap. Today I've popped and plopped a kaleidoscope of consistencies. Which I'm sure you were dying to know.

I've stayed busy acquiescing to cravings, devouring ice cream (topped with crushed, mint-filled chocolate cookie sandwiches, twelve cookies per half-later, which is to say the usual daily serving) and cakes and pies, pretending I know what it's like to be pregnant and eat whatever you want, whenever you want.  I suspect sets of meanspirited ladies will soon be wishing upon me the passing of a walnut-sized kidney stone, to authenticate the experience.
 
And then there are those small-appetited creatures, humans they may be, that assume my entrance to the room, hefting a bowl overflowing with a full liter of frozen dairy dessert, four packages of smashed chocomint cookies in my hoodie pocket ready to be rained atop, is an invitation to scamper for spoons.  There's a reason there's only one spoon -- mine -- stabbed into my daily heaven mound.  This bowl, your daily caloric allowance, is my weight maintenance.  My precious calories!
 
While I gorge myself, dumbed by dopamine, I can enjoy, with clarity, unless muffled by cookie-crunch, the comments escaping my volunteering colleagues.

1. "Did you make your own meat?" (Rosa) (The context is lost, but I swear it was funny.)
2. "We (Britian) have the highest pregnancy rate in all of Europe." (Laura)  "Wait, higher than the U.S.?" (Hallie)
3. "I just want my bloody clothes." (A terribly confused British friend -- and closet murderer?  Anyway, Wrong, you just wanna get rid of, burn or bathe in acid, dispose of utterly and completely, that DNA-stained evidence.)

As to killing calories, I've had the good fortune to befriend quality Peruvian hoopers, some even approaching normal human stature! (although not so tall to preclude requests that I man the post).  I played against a family of troll-statured, goblin-faced Peruvians, their features the hideously contorted messes of wax-statues in a Saharan heatwave, who literally could have walked into the shooting of Troll II and never been noticed.  Though, for all they've been deprived by wicked deities, they've been bestowed fundamental basketball prowess and work ethic.  After I flagrantly and intentionally fouled one, I looked down and patted, petted his mop of black hair, cooing "Lo siento" like a maniac.  I forgot he was probably forty.

And now an abrupt transition to the Latin American inability to make change, even for small bills.  Even at a grocery chain like Mega, a barcode-scanning operation.  So when the register comes up veinte centimos de un sol short, were talking like six cents here, instead of bothering another cashier for the change, my cashier starts eyeing her station, taking stock of what small value items she might be able to offer me.  "¿Té?" she asks, pointing to paper-pouches of Manzanilla Tea spilling out of an opened box.  Probably her personal stash.  "¿Fósforos?" she suggests, shrugging her shoulders while indicating a stray box of matches.  I started to laugh. Really? "Dame los fósforos," I replied, shaking my head.  The story of the matches in my pocket, which'll be convenient if I start getting those urges to commit arson again.

The upside of doing nothing else...more words, more frequently.

How many consecutive hours can hippie mochileros strum out identical acoustic insults to (my) good taste on their guitars?  That cheap rum must imbue them with special appreciation powers, because I'm chocking back vomit mixed with fantasies of spearing eyeballs with the jagged splinters from that very guitar smashed over hippie heads.

With frustration on the brain and the weekend's free-drink-and-panty-chasing club-bounce scheduled for tonight, looks like it's another round of feigned interest and repetitive sidestepping, enduring mindnumbing and eardeafening, salsa-saturated hours between three-minute invitations-to-grind, aka hip-hop.  I, as a proudly grinding estadounidense, admit I neither understand nor care to understand the European practice of dancing solo.  Gimme someone spittin' fire over a heavy bassline and a chunky backside to ride up against and I'll show you some rhythm.

While my head swivels high over the height-challenged Peruvian crowd, ostensibly scouring for a pretty thing to decorate my dormbed, I'm imagining myself transported back inside the grimy scribble-and-sticker tagged walls of Charlotte's The Milestone, a bunch of hoodied-up punk rock hooligans swimming through the standing clouds of cigarette smoke, everyone a PBR tallboy in hand, cute alternative chicks lounging around, all black eyeliner and bullsized nose-rings.  We're three hundred ears still ringing from the last set, a palpable buzz for the next act, the first thumped kickdrum to rattle our chests, the first crashing cymbal, the initial peal of guitar-in-tuning, any and all will ignite the stampede for stagefront position.  And, since this is my fantasy, I'm waiting for my fantasy headlining friends, One Another.

Afterward we're gonna hit a houseparty, a filthy-mouthed crew littering a residence with beer and bodily fluids to a death metal and laughter soundtrack, brutal, barbed insults that only best friends can toss and tolerate cutting through the cacophony.  Finally, once bodies are strewn unconscious across the apartment, somebody's gonna step around the scattered cards and toppled bottles and lurch towards their car, making an inadvisable, cop-dodging run to Waffle House, waking up the next morning both hungover and with hell brewing in their belly, courtesy to that triple order of hash browns, all-the-way.  This is where I come from, and that's what I'm missing a few months deep in fucked-stomach-dictated paralyzation.  Those friends. Those scenes.  Those $2.50 pint nights with fifty microbrews available on tap, at least eight hop-heavy IPA's.  While we're in the bar, conversing boisterously over beers with the proper measure of head, stashed in the car is this week's anti-air-freshener, styrofoam-boxed leftovers seeping fumes into the upholstery, international dinner scents -- Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador, Thailand, Lebanon, Italy, Colombia, Peru, Greece, Serbia or good ol' southern Soul Food, maybe a few slices of a meat-and-veggie littered pie; plus, if I dined within fifteen miles of Central Avenue, the obligatory monolithic slab of dessert from Landmark Diner's should-be-world-famous dessert case -- that'll follow me around until overpowered by next weekend's selection.

The unhealthy triumvirate and other impertinent blurbs

As if the diagnosis of Salmonella and amoebas wasn't overwhelming enough, the results of the four-day cultured stool sample also revealed I'm teeming with semi-drug-resistant E. coli.  On a related note, I'm becoming way too practiced pooping into cups.

The upside of intestinal insanity's dietary restrictions might be pan con miel de abejas.  Proof that the simplest things in life can spread a smile across my scruffy lowerskull, the morning bagful of ciabatta dipped and bathed in gooey golden plastic-jarred goodness never fails to lure me from my alpaca cocoon.

Bearing similarities to Bolivia's altitude-aided thrashing of Argentina in World Cup Qualifying, yesterday Cusco's high-elevation (3,400m) wind humiliated me 4-1 in a hardly competitive one-on-one futbol faceoff.  I'd package all my depleted energies between hyperventilated gasps -- I had walked all four blocks to the court -- into fierce taps, nudging the ball toward the far goal, collapsing into a wheezing heap as breezes would breathe the ball back past me, rolling it to my left or right and down the concrete cancha, over crack-sprouted weed-tufts, at a pace similar to that at which most mother's push their toddlers, while I hacked and coughed dangling, chin-decorating lengths of cottonmouthed phlegm through spittle-flecked lips, spiritually and physically devastated, reduced to an easily overcome obstacle in the wind's triumph.

Medical Mysteries

There's a storm of speculation swirling through my cranium, in that I'm currently playing host to armies of tummy tormentors and it's universally known that exposure to germy kids, as teachers galaxy-wide will attest, is a surefire gateway to sickness.  Especially when the kids are third-world dwellers, and their dirty exploring digits tend to gravitate toward your face, squeezing your cheeks, pulling at the lips you've sealed tight to thwart the introduction of microscopic nastiness (thereby rendering impossible oral denunciations).  It's probable I leave school everyday with billions of crawling bits of promised torture and medical expenses smeared around my mouth, every chapped liplick inviting inside a few hundred million invaders.

That's conventional thinking.  But what if I've actually eaten a Peruvian child, whole.  What if there's a chusqui sucio clambering about my guts.  It's not so farfetched.  You couldn't have possibly eaten a child, you say.  Have you ever seen Peruvian children? I counter.  Every time I tread a pile of dogshit on the street, I fear I've trampled a Peruvian kid.  Almost every time a vendor accosts me near the market, hollering something about finger puppets for un solcito, I scour her palmed and finger-riding wares to verify no terrified children are mixed in with the cloth imitations.  No, you've probably never seen one, not unless you've rested your head on the sidewalk, one eye level with the concrete -- ¿hormiga o amiga? -- or regularly examine surfaces with a magnifying glass.

So maybe there was a niñito mixed in with the bunch of bananas I bought the other afternoon, or maybe one fell into the vat of leche at the school. Maybe, exhausted after a run, hands on my knees and breathing like a vacuum, I accidentally sucked up a pedestrian pequeñito passing between my feet.  I don't wanna abort the bastard, I just want him outta my belly.  So I should just do everything they advise pregnant mothers not to do, right?

Regardless, there was very little real threat...

There's something about booze that makes me, well, fucking stupid.  So here I am a week and some ago, walking home alone from the tragos gratis circuit around Cusco's Plaza de Armas.  It's 2am and I'm walking the deserted stretch back to my hostel, approaching two not-particularly-hoodlum-looking Peruvian youths traipsing my direction afoot.  Really, I'm just thinking about sandwiches.  A juicy thank you hamburger to offer the belly demons I'm happy have quieted themselves for the night, allowing me to drink and grind without anal-clenching.

I'm meandering through daydream, the sizzling grease hopping and dancing upon the pan, a sexy Cusqueña behind the grill ready to flip my burger, her short apron pegged midchest upon cold-activated -- when I'm startled from food porn by a two-handed thrust to the chest.  I stagger back, the alcohol advising me I can easily conquer these two normal-sized Peruvians, which is to say half-sized humans: "¿Cómo?"

"Dános dos soles."

I shrug my shoulders and try to walk through the human roadblock again, again detained by a push.  Well, I can just walk around the block, I think, though while the brain is occupied by thinking, the mouth begins to spout. "Ay, hijueputa, chúpame la verga, huevón."

The feet begin retracing their path down the block, I turn my back to the kids and my elevated blood alcohol content succeeds in raising a middle finger over each shoulder, while my mouth continues to spout obscenities.  The strange intoxication of adrenaline mixed with pleasure, pleasure that my Spanish is sufficiently proficient to fluently insult.

I end up at the corner and the two punks walk by.  We're still jawing at each other, my stares and stabs stalking them up the block.  Someone says something about go back to your country.  I invent something offensive generalization about Peruvians.  The more eager of the two stops and faces me, raising both arms wide and putting palms to heaven.  I do the same and continue practicing Tourette's, never one to let things die when my heart's beating booze.  Everything's a competition with me.

He begins to walk toward me, his friend lingering on the far corner, arms akimbo.  We're face to face, sharing breaths between strings of abuse, unblinking.  Then I'm laughing at him. Then he's slapping me, but gently.  Not enough to trigger my violence.  I don't see the friend approach, not that his presence changes my tune.  But I respond to the screwdriver he reveals tucked into his waistline, raising both hands, palms forward, "Ya no hay problema.  No tengo ningún problema con Uds."

"Andate, huevón."

I walk home quickly, hand jammed into my pocket, fingers caressing cold metal casing, the pen that, until now, has only been considered an implement to scribble notes.

Like they say, traveling teaches you to adapt.

The ugly side of third world travel

When the message materialized on my Facebook wall, "tell me an adventure... i want to live vicariously through you... :)," I figured it was time to demythicize the pure-heaven factor the cubicle-bound suburban-toiler adheres to the quit-your-job-to-continent-hop-until-the-cash-quits-you travel addiction.  Granted, if sanitary standards in the third world approached those of the squeaky clean USA, or if I had any willpower to resist hygienically dubious, corner-vended streetmeats or papas rellenas scooped from a basket and bequeathed via waste-caked, wart-gnarled hands, I'd probably not be approaching a fully-fingered hand's-worth of months of intestinal dystopia.  Or, in the doctor's words, "Where and what have you been eating?"

So, if you wanna live vicariously through me, the only exercise you'll be enjoying is toilet-tag, the sprint between bed and bathroom, an experience where any venture outside of the 100m I can make it in time anal-blast radius is opportunity for your intestinal partnership in discomfort, asshole-dwellers Salmonella and amoebas, to surprise you with a 10-second countdown, leaving you bug-eyed and swivel-headed, which business is getting invaded this time? and, fuck, please tell me I've got some toilet paper in my back pocket!  Then there's the drastically restricted diet, and don't forget that diarrhea drastically reduces your (maybe self-ascribed) sexiness, so careful when you answer the question, ¿Cómo estás?

Draped in chiquitos

Hoy kicked off my third and (for now) final week volunteering with Aldea Yanapay, a Cusco, Peru organization that operates an after-school program for seventy-some-odd Cuzqueñitos, beautiful and affectionate children arriving from predominantly impoverished families, many further afflicted by abuse, addiction, anything from the litany of crushing conditions I've been privileged never to encounter; conditions which, between the mind-boggling statistics (i.e. 75% of Peruvian women are subject to some form of physical or psychological abuse; estimations that over 40% of Peruvians live below the poverty line; etc.) and the tangible squalor radiating away from every city's scattered and gated enclaves of cash, we can conclude are disturbingly common conditions.

Working with mis chusquitos, whose smiling faces illuminate my weekdays from 3-7pm, is nothing short of a challenge, a welcome test of patience and flexibility after the numbness of eternal saturday, the alternate reality through which I've floated since...

Ah, mis corazoncitos, who for my bronzed complexion and relative giantism must mistake me for a cheerful, bipedal tree, their constant charging and climbing adorning my limbs with adolescents, scissored legs around my back securing una chiquita to my torso, gleeful shrieks and gap-toothed giggles bobbing at my face as I tickle her sides.  

Presentando la colección Verano Peruaño 2010, diseñando por PBA: Draped in chiquitos.

During class I can generally repel their charges, though sometimes their sneak leap-and-clamber street assaults have me ready to turn-out my pockets until I discern their squeals and featherweight, the peck at my cheek. ¡Hola, Profe!

During school various classes are intended to busy the kids from 3-7, math and art, games and study hall, later an hour or so with one's respective, age-determined "family" to plan and prepare a presentation for the week's-end show, though childhood's as-easily-inflamed-as-acetone excitability coupled with attention spans shorter tha-- wait, what were we talking about? transform this objective into struggle-of-the-day.  But it's a welcome struggle, an exercise in adaptation and creativity, how can I sustain their interest while working within educational parameters?  It's exhausting. It's rewarding. It's my new addiction.

Of tantamount importance is the quality of the organization's contributors; from the direction to the volunteers, Aldea Yanapay is brimming with eager and inspirational, genuinely hilarious (after-hours rum-swilling, rumba-fiending) souls (soulless me excluded, obviously), unconditionally-loving role models as positive as -- dammit, I was so close to achieving the rare, nay, mythical, "clean post" -- Magic's HIV.

Chapter Two: We've got a new shirt slogan here.

I'd flirted with zzzs for the last few hours but never settled any deeper into dream than the average person does driving home from the bar at 3am (get a taxi), a little nod here and there with a quick and unpleasant recovery, thanks to giggles and shrieks and such emanating from the $3 orgy-pad in our sound-conducive hostel.

So when the girls were finally booted I sighed and began melting into the mattress until CRACK! smashed the door into the wall, anew shaking lead-based flecks from the painted concrete, shuddering flakes across the carpet like wall dandruff.  My eyelids craaaaaaaankily garage-doored upward, exposing my looming tomato-headed amigo, his brain-container sagging so far toward his chest that it appeared his torso had gobbled his neck, his inebriated T-Rex shortarming adding a comical effect to his personage.  He gurgled something, pinballed between beds and the wall and ended up seated on the queen, facing me, left arm stabilizing his woozily leaning mass against my travel pack.  "Oh, jesus, don't throw up," began it's loop through my cranium.  Chase's chin would slowly droop into his ribcage, he'd begin a Gumby-topple to one side, then he'd shake his head, mumble something, gaze around the room in senseless stupor, and then rise, his heavy, tilted head providing the momentum to carry him back out of the room.

This routine was repeated at least ten times over the next hour, with several highlights, the most hilarious being several sudden crumples onto the concrete patio outside our room, followed by several minutes of Peter Griffinesque, knee-hugging, monotone moaning.  There was also the glossolalia-heavy tirades directed at the night watchman, and, once his shift had ended, at Sunday-morning sweetheart Milagros ("Whaaaarsh yooooour - *bleeeeeeeaaaaach* - naaaaame?" "Wha'on'cha talk a'me?"), profanity-laced abuses that eventually urged me out of bed, ready to scold.

I encountered a googly-eyed maniac chomping down an apple. "Chase, calm down."

"Whah? 'M no' dun' anythin'.  Wh'on't sh'talk a'me? FUCK!"

"Dude, she doesn't speak English.  You're hammered and being a fucking asshole.  Please, shut the fuck up and get in bed!"

"What?  How'uh fuck can'u calmyan asshole.  You wur sleep intha street laznight!"

Touché.

So he continued to stalk Milagros as effectively as any shadow, a Silly Putty-postured bumbler occasionally swigging from the half-liter of warm beer he'd discovered stashed in the corner of our bedroom -- as Chase'd inform me later, prior to the warm Pilsen, he'd already drained a bottle of liquor he'd pilfered from the community fridge -- occasionally veering from her side to yet again have his attempts to pump "Still Dre" through the hostel's sub-woofer equipped computer thwarted.  The first round of retard-karaoke had been sufficient torture for all the hotel's inhabitants, regardless of any language barriers.

It was quite miraculous, witnessing the alcohol-induced deterioration of a human being at 8am, yet fearful when surfaced the rage, a windmilling, air-punching, sudden onset violence straight from 28 Days Later.  He'd storm into the room, ranting mindlessly that nobody would let him do what he wanted! and why wouldn't she talk to him?  The indiscriminate screaming and punching pulled me upright in bed, with both hands readying my comforter to smother the beast should need be.  Chase picked up a plastic sheet of 50-caliber stomach pills and pushed one through the foilback, popped it into his mouth and began to masticate.  He managed an impressive, senses-delayed ten seconds before his eyes crossed and he began thrashing towards the bathroom, white-specks flying his lips, the tortured howls escaping with the powder-shower reminiscent of the primal pains of a full-grown human suddenly freed from lifelong captivity below some pervert's staircase.  He spent a few minutes in the bathroom spitting and gagging and growling, emerging stamping toward his bed, where he lifted his large travel backpack from the floor, proceeding to shake all its contents onto the floor.

And I'll never forget what happened next, when Chase jammed the empty bag over his head, pulling it down over his shoulders and arms, and then proceeded to perform what would equate to a shriek-accompanied standing seizure, a human-imitation of starved pitbulls in a bag, fighting over a steak.  When the bag came off Chase set about the room, retrieving and jamming all of his possessions into his 60L cloth cavern, emptying the bedside table of everything including the lamp, which I somehow convinced him to return to it's place amidst shards of newly-broken glass.

I watched in utter disbelief as Chase hefted the pack onto his back, strapping the smaller daypack to his chest.  "Fuuuuuuuck you!  Nobody let's me have any fun!  I hate this place.  I hate it!!!" he shrieked, sprinting toward the door.  But our door is actually two small wooden doors that open inward, latching in the middle.  Thus, while attempting to squeeze out of the single, inwardly-opened door, his bulging bags caught on the doorframe and the immobile door, producing a few hysterical and maniacal seconds of sprinting in place, his legs churning and arms pumping through pained shouts, "Let me go, Pleeeeeeeease, LET ME GO!" before his determined wiggling sent him lurching into the patio, from where he sprinted to the hostel door, threw it open and flew into the street, famous last words freezing me in disbelief, "Fuck you! Fuck everybody! 'M'goin' to Bolivia!"


Despite the obvious instability of the gringo sprinting through the streets, screaming "TAXI! TAXI! Take me to Bolivia!", I guess Peruvian nuevos soles are scarcer than I'd realized, as the first taxi on the scene pulled to a stop and calmly loaded up the liquor-bomb, whose passenger seat wailing reverberated even after the taxi had disappeared around the corner, the taxi driver presumably deducing from the baggage and torrent of BOLIVIAs that la terminal terrestre was the desired point-of-departure.

Chase disappeared, without paying his bills, at 8:30am one Sunday morning.  Twenty-five hours later I received an email detailing a drunken emergence from blackout at 4:30pm, on a bus somewhere between Cusco and Lima, where after being calmed by the bus attendants Chase accepted his fate and crashed back into unconsciousness.  He even managed to arrive with all his bags.

Thank god I have Chase to make me look like less of a problem drinker.


(As some of my fellow Cusco volunteers have suggested, with a picture of Chase's face plastered between the quotes, "Fuck you! Fuck everybody! I'm goin' to Bolivia!" would make a fantastic shirt.)

Chapter One: Look what the dog dragged in.

I stripped down to my boxers and snuggled under the blankets, turning onto my side and cocooning myself from the cold Cuzco night, one foam earplug already wedged and expanding, the other being rolled between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand -- that arm exposed from armpit down, over the covers -- preparing for insertion. My right fist, knuckles set against my mandible, supported my head; the elbow burrowed in the mattress elevating my body from waist up as I followed Chase ambling about, Pilsen Callao pumping through his veins, huffing out fume-tinged last gasps to inspire my resurrection.

“Alright, dude,” he surrendered, then stepped through the door.

“Hope you find some cuties.” I called toward his back. “And bring me one back too, if you do,” I added with a sly smile and a snicker.

He turned around with a face that implied everything in a wink and closed the door. I laid back, reached over my head with one arm to pull the unplugged ear upward, stretching the canal to facilitate the introduction of a spongy sound barrier. Then I killed the lights and melted into sueno.

I startled awake as the unstopped door crashed into the wall.  Chase staggered in, mashing on the lights to illuminate a puffy face so universally beet-colored it might've passed for a bad sunburn, if the spike of liquor didn't so permeate the air, his motions, and his words.  Neither the scratches on my watchface nor my blurry vision distorted the time, 5:38am.

"Eh, aaaaaaahhh, I gotcha un," he burped and giggled mysteriously, with strange satisfaction throwing a thumb over his shoulder just as two rather-hooker-looking women made an entry that would certainly not be mistaken for gliding. “Your friend is crazy,” I heard in heavily accented Spanish. I was praying these were hideous aftereffects of the Chinese dinner until one touched me, Chase and the other falling onto the queen-sized bed, buried in each other's mouths, scavenger hunting for tonsils. He came up for air and instructed with a glance, “You fuck her,” before returning to tongue-drilling. Skin -- or more specifically rolls of flesh falling-over and bunching-up around a bra – jiggled into view as Chase wrestled the dress.

My appointed girl kept looming and blabbering, but all I understood was a disc-skipping refrain of “STD. STD!”

“Nah, Chase. Hey. Fuck, Chase! Dude, not in here, please. And I’m not sleeping with this girl. Who is she?”

“What, man? You told me to bring you one! Just fuck her.”

“No.”

After a few dozen identical volleys, he proclaimed my loss and declared a threesome. But my hand hovered over the light-switch, stifling the impending orgy.

What ensued was a prolonged battle between a drunk-and-obviously-undiscriminating penis and a tired, sober and disgusted gringo too well-informed about bricheras and their penchant for slipping out with pocketfuls of swindled loot. Over the course of which voices were raised, the word “putas” slipped from my lips, and my outright refusal to tag my willing-without-a-single-encounter sextoy was used for ammo to blast me with a limited-English refrain of “You are gay,” and “I hope you have cancer in your penis.” There was a momentary intermission when an Argentinean friend also stumbled in, drawn to the commotion and female voices, and for a few moments occupied the mouth of my verbally-abusive appointed-pussy. But then it was more of the same.

“Pat, man, what the Fuck?!” Chase would scream. “Why’re you cockblocking me?”

“Have you ever had a threesome? Then why’re you fucking ruining my chance!?”

“Fuck, Pat, just turn off the lights. Yeah, turn ‘em off.”

Or flipping my suggestion back on me, “Pat, leave. Leave! Go get another room.”

Thirty minutes of logic later Chase angrily agreed to take the girls upstairs, when it became apparent my stubbornness wasn’t subsiding -- allowing me to unglue my eyes from my valuables. There followed a few hours of relative peace, though peals of laughter and reprimanding knocks at their door from the night watchman kept me from falling asleep. At some point the girls were expelled from the hotel, though not until after they’d entertained themselves, barricading themselves in their room, ignoring both Chase’s and the watchman’s appeals to open up.

Then somewhere around 7:30am it got interesting.

De vez en cuando...

Every once in a while you feel the impetus to write, and every once in a while that every once in a while is a 4am post-clubbing session, when the ringing in your ears is so pronounced that it's like Daddy Yankee followed you home from the club -- like a pesky Cusco coke dealer -- and is playing a concert directly in your ear canal. So if those filth-grayed, months-"recycled" earplugs can't drown out the sound, pump a little high-volume Elliot Smith through your earbuds and see what slivers of sensibility can stab through your volume-and-alcohol stifled senses.

I've lost track of time through my various regimens of anti-belly-buddy medications, and doubtless I've nuked everything good and bad, from natural intestinal flora to parasitic invaders, that once resided in my guts.  I think I might feel a bit better than I did a month ago, but that might be due to my recently unwavering commitment to a perpetually above-legal B.A.C.  And the bruises running down the right side of my body -- knee, hip, shoulder, and eye -- are reminders that my friend found me crumpled on the side of the road at 2:30am -- somewhere along the four block path between my Cusco hostel and the debauchery-mecca Plaza de Armas, sometime after following the first prolonged potent-beverage binge with an unadvisable corner rum-swilling session with four or five questionable Cuzqueños -- where for an undetermined number of hours unconsciousness had transformed me into a personalized form of third-world "urban sprawl,"  emerging somehow unrobbed, unraped, and undead. (And, yes, mom, dad, friends and relatives, I'm every bit as appalled and relieved as you.) Google helped me identify high altitude as the sneaky accomplice to excess, so tonight I stuck to beer and a few cocktails.  Which is why I can pound out coherent sentences approaching sunrise.

That my friend, literally moments after bemoaning my disappearance to his taxista, happened to spot my splayed form and scream "STOP!", and then devote a healthy 10 minutes to wrangling my gibberish-gabbing corpse into the cab, then later into the hostel and into my bed, well, it's been suggested I should buy the chap a beer.  But for reasons I'll delve into shortly, that might not be the most prudent suggestion.

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.

The War and Drugs and Amazonian Bugs (in my belly)

Lima is a pretty rad place, and not only because it's named after a bean.

Or maybe that's the other way around. Factually, it is. Fuck you joke ruining Wikipedia.

Man, a puff of haziness no more profound than a that's a finger in my ass-gasp-of-surprise really puddles my honeypot of a head.  I...don't want...can't...do...anything.  Even the usual nerdutainment challenge of trying to correct a Blogger-flagged, red-underlined misspell just gets copied-and-pasted into Dictionary.com.  It was something eggregious like entreprunureal.

Maybe not Locked Up Abroad roulette like walking a sack of weed from Belize into Guatemala, but still a fun round of Will You Please Empty My Wallet, Señor Policia?, I put in a good four hours of Lima driving a few weeks back, with a copy of an expired NC driver's license. Lima rush-hour, crunch-time driving. Ton-weight bumper cars at 80km/hr.  Lanes are suggestions. Stoplights yearlong Christmas decorations. And right in the middle of dodging weaving microbuses crammed with at least 15 certain dead, my 17-year-old hermanita Celeste gets through on-air to a major Lima radio station.  I can hear her coming out of the speakers.  Then there's a phone on my face, and I'm jabbering in English and Spanish across Lima, back to myself.  I should be getting laid for this. I'm definitely not. No, motherfuckers, I'm not Chilean. I'm not Argentinean.  Just a dark-featured Gringo who happens to spit a lil' castellano. I'll tack on a blond wig and baby powder this Greek-featured face if it turns you on.  I'd let you layer my eyeballs with lead-based-watercolors if Skinemax and stripclubs didn't exist.

But, shit, dude, leaning on that horn like every shrill burst is juicing up some glowing throbbing video game bar you have hovering somewhere in the upper corner of your lifescreen is fuuuuuuuuuuuuuun. Like doing your part in the war against overpopulation plowing indiscriminately through crosswalks. Laying down speedbumps to control all the maniacs chasing you with their blaring horns. Run The Gauntlet with pedestrians challenging your bumper instead of head-seeking strikes-from-the-laces.

Do you think considering staying in Lima an extra three weeks -- close to an NCAAairing Sports Bar -- just to guarantee I don't miss this year's first Duke-UNC contest is extreme? (Seriously, I'm impaired. I actually just clicked search on Dictionary.com because I couldn't figure out what was wrong with Extreem.) Oh, as to that question. Of course the answer is NO, all you pussy non-real-fans.

You don't support this post if you don't support weed. And I don't even really smoke, but that backpacker peer pressure to enhance the flavor of the liter of Lúcuma ice cream -- clenched between your thighs, cold condensation relief from the Lima sauna soaking your Dickies shorts -- is hard to resist.

...

Damn. I just did a reread. Probably shouldn't have wasted my "you don't support this if you don't support weed" plea to get paid by High Times.