scientists predict that after expanding, the universe may collapse on itself

well, if you've read my original declaration of intent (or if you haven't), i'll admit that no, i have NOT succeeded in writing an entry every day, NOR have i kept this blog wildly interesting. YES, at the time of this entry, this blog would appear like all the rest o' them blogs whose authors have mysteriously disappeared with the likes of amelia earhart, j.d. salinger, et al.
however, i think i'm satisfied leaving the previous entries as they are, as a little time capsule, nuggets of yore, and what-have-you. this entry marks a definitive break between the existing entries and any/all that shall come hereafter.

i may continue to post entries on this blog. i may not. i may begin another. i haven't decided yet.

at the very least, i hoped tonight to accomplish the simple goal of stating my desire for some sort of thematic closure to the adventure described thus far, though i suppose i'm not REALLY doing that now. instead i'm just posting something to "save face," as it were, whatever that really means.

suffice it to say that the trip to mexico's pacific coast described in this here bloggywog has come to an end. in fact, i departed a handful of days after the last entry (the first national bank of...) and flew home, stopping briefly in new york city, just long enough to reunite with old friends and join my grandparents for an all-you-can-eat turkish lunch buffet.

i'm home now and life is as good as can be expected right now.

to sum up the entire trip in one half of a half-assed fashion: it was largely a success.
to quote kurt vonnegut jr. one more time:
"it was beautiful, and nothing hurt."


...except for that boiling water on my scalp.


Mrreow?



-oatmeal, out.

the first national bank of the river of daydreams, or: goats are so cute!

every afternoon, after the cows and goats and sheep have grazed all day, a friendly farmer comes by on horseback to round them up and move them out down the road to their shelters for the evening. recently, my routine has involved work in the morning and an early afternoon shower, after which, i stand on the terrace and watch the parade roll by. sometimes a bull tries to mount a mate on the way out, but otherwise it's pretty quiet. serene actually, like a gently meandering stream, with the plub and fsh and splsssh of water replaced by ba-a-a and eh-eh-eh and muuuh of livestock, bobbing and clopping on their way to the barns.
today, the farmer had his youngest son ride with him, tucked up front on the saddle, while two other sons rode in similar fashion on another horse.

i have a feeling that during my first week back home, i'll be searching my hometown for a similar scene and most likely will not find anything like it within 15 minutes of downtown. actually, first i fly into the big gray apple and will have to deal with city-shock rather immediately.

ah, new york. new amsterdam, mannahatta, the city that never sleeps. never sleeps. never sleeps. nope, never. about eight years ago today, i watched replay replay replay of this insomniac city daydreaming its nightmare. in that dream-vision a magic eightball filled with cold sweat shatters on the ceiling and tells all the answers at once - all truth, all lies, facts, opinions, skulls, wombs, oceans, fires, eyes - and in an instant all of these things are golden ants on black sand, building a castle on a hill, and suddenly a gust of blue bullet rain and claws of lightning breathe fire across the hill and somewhere a man in a suit sips a cup of coffee and in the moment taken to lick a molecule of java from his upper lip the silence of a million stars imploding deafens him and then BAM! - a million more stars are born, blinding him and leaving him in a dumb stupor until he feels the sun on his skin and turns to it, with nothing left to do but follow it west. the sun shines powerfully and yet there is a constant rain. as his knees and ankles slowly rust, the flesh melts off his neck and back to reveal his red-iron bones, and he lightly fingers the top of his spine, where he finds a small anthill, with tiny golden ants still working to perfect their endless clockwork temple.

this nightmare daydream has been stuck on repeat for the past eight years, and every morning it plays, that same afternoon, a farmer in a small town on the pacific coast of mexico herds his cows and his goats and his sheep and brings them to their stables to sleep for the evening.

all constants.

what if the river were a variable?

it is this i am left to ponder, when i return home to stand by the banks of the gentle oswego and the shores of great ontario. so it goes.

pressure

today i learned a thing or two about sea snails, caracoles. they are very easy to catch if you can spot them. if you try to cook them, apparently they only need a short while in hot/boiling water before they are ready to be extracted from the shell. i left them in the pot for too long today and they basically were cooked in their shells.

this meant that they retracted further into their shells the longer they cooked, which made it quite difficult to pull them out from within their spiral hideaways. i tried forks, a corkscrew - even a hammer for cryin' out loud. cryin'? ooooooohh, i been cryyyyyiiiin, ever since you been gooooone... ooh! baaaaaa-yyy--aaayyy-yyay-bay!!! why you hidin in that shell of yourrrrs? i just might be a pyscho with a hammer at your dooooooooor. bay-buh, bay-buh, oh!!

anyway, figured that one out the hard way.

also in the aquatic news today, fresh fish were speared by T & L. Veneno mixed us up some of the ill ceviche -- sooooo gooood! fish, lemon, onion, salt, spicy green peppers, all on tostadas... mmmm. i feel like i haven't eaten much else today, but i don't mind. it was such an immediate reward from all of the fishing. well, i didn't catch any fish myself. i think i may have bruised one that i found out isn't good to eat anyway. but, uh, i held the bag again. y'know, just like one of the guys! guys? hey wait up!!


Mrreow?


im evenin mort aquasis neusen, dem leek ain heartly leeken nah moor. eye flixed ip pup.


Mu-Mrreow!?


also, we lost all pressure in our own water lines today. then it came back. so everything has returned to awesome/norbal.

feelin like a half-eaten lizard on my bedroom floor

so after a night out with the crew, i slept in til 11, got up, watered the yacca tree and the starfruit and was, by chance, surveying the perimeter of the property when i heard a funky bubbling to my left. egads! a broken water line! so i called over the wall to the first neighbor i saw and he strolled over to check it out. we dug out the line a little from the muddy pond it was forming around itself. then he ran to get strips of old bicycle inner-tubes. he wrapped the pipes up pretty well and we let it sit until the water came back on (city water in this small-town mexican pueblito runs from 8am-noon and 5-11pm). at 5 i checked it out and saw that it was leaking a bit so i attempted to patch it up with one of the extra rubber strips. well, if that didn't completely ruin all of the previous efforts.... however, i think in the long run it served well enough to encourage me to find another option, namely, finding another length of pipe of slightly smaller girth to insert into the other two pipes and make a solid connection. so far this has worked. we'll see how it looks tomorrow morning.

in other news, i've eaten 1 and 1/2 mango today. snake you, parcheesi.

i took down a few more wasp nests. this time i didn't even imagine using boiling water. i just folded up the end of a dry palm frond and burnt my way to victory. not a big fan of destroying homes but perhaps i've already written something about not enjoying it, after that first major battle.

also, negrita caught a large lizard today and snuck it into the house, where she proceeded to munch on it in my bedroom. i guess the lizard was full of pee or negrita wasn't really hungry or something, cuz she just left most of the lizard carcass in several pieces on the floor. when i cleaned up the mess, i realized i should probably mop that floor anyway, so i added it to the list of things to do before DD returns home. still i tried to scold the cat to what seems to be varying degrees of success. she'll be totally forgiven in about 8 hours anyway.

listening to simon & garfunkel on the terrace today, gazing out into the palms, i realized that their greatest hits will now always take me back here... in my mind. this makes me happy.

and, i made some more yogurt today, which i have to check on. now.

tomorrow may hold spearfishing in the cards but we'll wait and see. in the meantime, i'll focus on reporting only the most exciting tidbits of my continuing adventures down south, way down, jalisco way.

uuuuuhhhhh.


Mrreow?

the weekly mango? weakly? weally? or: the words of the prophets are written when the engine stalls

alright it's been a while. i'm not even sure i'm ready to write right now, even though i would like to commit to a more regular writing schedule. i guess i'm just figuring out where to put all of my thoughts. do they go here? do they go in my journal, that sits by my bed and allows me to record my dreams when i wake up? should i just be scribbling little notes in my miniature notepads throughout the day? sending detailed emails to friends and relations? all of the above!?

hm. i cleaned a pila the other day. never done that before. it's a tub of water next to a cement sink. people keep fish in them to eat mosquito larvae that would otherwise form in the water. two of the three fish died so after consulting with M, i decided to drain the filthy water and scrub the tub. it was gross, but not very. i mean, there are much filthier jobs in this world. the worst part was crawling underneath the cement basin where there is a 3x3x3-foot area that the fish usually hide out in. i just smelled like fish poo for a while after that, then took a shower. no big deal. the third fish stayed in a bucket while i cleaned and refilled the pila and went right back in when everything was finished. he/she is happily swimming in clear water now, with little bits of oats thrown in each day to satisfy fish hunger.

i also recently put no fewer than 5 tire patches on no fewer than 3 wheels of no fewer than 2 bikes. actually, those numbers are exact. now S and i have bikes again.

hurricane jimena (sp?) is passing by now. it's calm at the moment but it rained all day yesterday and this morning. it'll head north before it hits land though, probably fucking up a lot of people's vacations on baja california in spots like cabo san lucas. otherwise, the ocean will swell and the wind will blow and the clouds will drift on by.... maybe i'll have more exciting stuff to tell when the dark weather passes.

i suppose the appropriate tangential segue here is that today is the four-year anniversary of my trip to cuba to study abroad. i went with a dear friend and he and i are still buds to this day. the ultimate connection to this nerve is that he and i went jogging through a hurricane, rita, i believe, when it was a mere category 3, throwing all kinds of debris through the streets of havana. days were golden, my friends.

in conclusion, my summer vacation was the best ever, and i hope everyone who wants to gets the chance to run through the cuban capital during a category 3 hurricane. k bye!

boo. this post sucked! who is this guy, anyway?

along comes mister oysterhead, or: found in translation

my main chore yesterday was cleaning the house in anticipation of company. my friend from home, S, will be joining me for work & play over the next 3 & 1/2 weeks. i'm excited to have some human interaction around the house on a more regular basis. i mean, it's cool talking to a cat, but most responses end up like 'mrreow?' i know this could mean lots of things, bu i think it usually translates to, "yo, hook a sister up with some kibble, or what you oddly refer to as 'mushy num-nums.' " and at least once a day it means, "lemme inside, dude! i am preparing to sleep in the computer room for the next 10 hours. also, more kibble! and don't you dare skimp on the bits that look like little fishies!"



Mrreow?



as you can see, i could use some more healthy human interaction in my diet.



so after i cleaned up for a while and set up a room for S, i decided to ride to the beach. as soon as i get there this dude yells 'oye!' and waves me over to him and his group. when he waves he does that sort of mexican wave, which looks like he's airing out his armpits, as opposed to the american wave that i'm used to which has more of an allure of old school fisticuffs, Notre Dame Fighting Irish style. Wait, isn't "Notre Dame" "Our Lady" in French?



Mrreow?



with all of these cosmic reverse hand gesture shenanigans going about, it's a good thing we didn't try to hi-five, otherwise i fear we would've slapped each other on the knee caps.

anyway, what he and his buddies are up to is just chillin drinkin tequila and getting ready to scarf down some big oysters, or some other such creature that has an inverse relationship between its tender insides and rock hard outer body. like a forlorn bodybuilder. so naturally, after i said yes to the tequila offer, i figured i had to say yes to the oyster offer. in my travels, i've found it very rude to refuse an offer of a communal dish in other neighborhoods.

that said, i think i'll continue to let oysters to continue to do their own thing, which, from what i can tell, does not involve voluntarily jumping down my throat like a sandy squish ball of... mushy num-nums?



Mrreow?





I thanked the boys for sharing and as my oyster-loving friend started kicking The Cranberries' Dreams out of his car speakers, i knew it was time to jump into the ocean. so i hummed the lines to the song as i made my way to the waves and dove in. the waves were rolling and pleasant, so i let them wash me ashore and beach me like a whale. when i opened my eyes i saw two dogs barking around me, ostensibly warning somebody else that timmy had fallen down the well. but i got up and thanked them for their concern and they trotted off to go sniff something in the sand, ah! the sand! so beautiful it is, peppered with little flecks of gold. be they real gold or just pyrite matters not to me (though i assume the latter since no one is rushing this place like '49...1849, that is) - what i like is the aesthetic possibility of a gilded beach, and therefore, gilded sandcastles. i decided then to build a castle, since i wasn't dead, like the dogs had assumed, and was feeling rather alive instead.
so i gave my castle the obligatory flags (read: broken sticks and weird green beanpod), built up some walls, even placed a little plastic blue turtle i had found on the front of the castle to guard the place, and i sat. i sat and i waited for its utter destruction. i had also written in the sand with a stick: WORLD, THIS IS MY CASTLE, with an arrow pointing from the word castle to the actual castle-object for clarification.

while the first big wave immediately erased this declaration, along with the castle's main breakwall, a woman in her 30s, thin, dark hair, rolled up in a golf cart that was tricked out as a mobile ice cream dispensin shoppe.

she smiled at me and my castle and i said triumphantly, "behold! eso es mi castillo! mira: tengo banderas. y aqui, hay una tortuga quien lo cuida quando no estoy aqui."

she laughed and asked, "y el agua lo va a destruir?"

"si," i replied, "como todos."



Mrreow?

"i'm gonna get you with my DEATHBAG!"

Well, so much for the daily entry. I tried, believe me, I tried. But I ran into some technical dificulties that set me back a few days, then I just didn't feel like it. Besides, at the moment, I don't feel I have anything terribly interesting to report. Daily activities: feeding the cat, eating mangoes, going to the beach, figuring out what to eat for dinner, wahing the dishes, and so on and so forth, not necessarily ad nauseum, but ad infinitum, at least. At least to infinty? There's an odd statement.
One of the locals and I have been chatting a lot recently. I'll call him M. M tells me stories of local history and asks questions about the ol' US of A. We have good talks. We also trade mangoes for starfruit, yogurt recipes for limes & oranges, etc. I'm not sure what to offer up for his wife's chiles rellenos recipe. They probably don't need the cool shells I found at the beach today. Hm. Well, I'll keep those anyhow. One of them looks like a butterfly. The other could be put on a necklace.
Yesterday, M asked me about my tattoos, specifically about the little house I used to live in, which is sketched onto my inner thigh, just above my knee. I told him it's something of a tribute for a friend who passed away. He was sad to hear about it, but today I told him that the day before, I hadn't realized that that very day was the one-year anniversary of my friend's passing. M got a a kick out of this. He said that my friend was making sure that I remembered him on that day. As he said this he smiled and pointed to the heavens above. I laughed and told him he was probably right. I love how so many Mexicans Catholics appear far more strict in their beliefs than, say, the North American Catholics I know, yet they have a much more jovial approach to death. Perhaps this last example isn't the best illustration, but I can sense an underlying wave here, one that ripples out, year-round from the great fiesta-splash of the Day & Night of the Dead celebrations. It seems to say, "death ain't so bad, if you've lived a good life." As far as I'm concerned, the Chosen One lived a great life, with great friends, as tragically short as that life may have been.
There is still, of course, plenty to be written about my friend. Suffice it to say, that now, one year later, I still miss him, but the initial gutwrench has subsided a bit, and I can begin to recall my memories of him, to put them into words, without feeling like complete shit.

Though the hole still burns, may the ember always glow.




***AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT***
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I suppose a recent newsworthy adventure was an afternoon spent spearfishing. I had never been spearfishing until this past Saturday. I don't even fish with a fishing pole at a fishing hole back home, and I live next to a river and lake! The locals and I agree this is strange, and I couldn't quite put my finger on the reason I don't fish, but then today it struck me. I remembered that the waterways around my home are heavily polluted. That's why.
So anyway, I went to the beach expecting to play futbol, but instead was invited to go fishing. A friend lent me a mask & snorkel, he grabbed his three pronged spear, his hawaiana, we waded through some waves, then swam out to meet his friends. They were already busy fishing out by the coral and the purple rocks that jut out of the water and give the adjacent beach its name: playa mora.
When we got to our rendezvous point, the other two boys said they had two fish already speared down below in the coral. When I looked under, I could see their spears, about 6 feet long, each leading into a small crevice. They had trapped the fish in there and were now trying to pull them out. They dove down about 12 feet and stabbed a few times to make sure they had their targets, then went down a few more times with hooks on fishing line to pull them out. The boys asked my friend to give it a shot and he went down a few times to try and grab the fish out but it wasn't happening. He's a hefty dude, but surprisingly graceful underwater. Like a whale. He's also a good goalie...like a wall?
Anyway, the boys finally grabbed the fish out the holes and brought them up. They were called botas, I think, and can fit comfortably in both hands. I didn't actually spear any fish myself, but I held the bag o' fish for a while so I got to check them out. These fish were pretty dark, but there were others that were quite colorful. Just think 'tropical' and see what pops into your head. There were blowfish, trumpetfish (like old-school-medieval-hear-ye-hear-ye-style trumpets, i.e. long, not compact like armstrong's or davis's), rockfish (yes they look like local rocks, & coral), fish that looked like larger tetras, and flat dark blue fish with light blue highlights. We ran into a school of silvery-white fish that I can't name. Also, as we went along, we picked up caracoles, the conch shells, which have all manner of crusty and slippery business growing on them. I guess you can boil these to get the meat out. When we got back, the boys set the conch aside and got to slicing up the bounty they had wrested from the bosom of the Pacific that afternoon. It was a bloody, smelly affair. Very interesting to see because, as mentioned before, I never fish. Not that I wouldn't like to start at some point soon.


It's my fishing pole
my fishing pole
I don't know

My fishing hole
my fishing hole
I don't know

-WTD



(rip, rrs, 189)