decisiones, cada día

I wish I could go home, but I can never really go home again.
One voice says, get up. go running, quit drinking, be alive
the other says grab a pack of good smokes, have a toast on me, go ahead and die.

Joe Bageant on international development

Next time someone asks me where to go volunteer in my country, what to do, how to start their project, I'm going to send this text by Joe Bageant:

Even our most well intentioned thinking and study of the afflictions of Africa and Latin America, American inner cities or Appalachia, suffers from hubris, because they are necessarily the products of western propertized and monetized thinking that cause the problem. So now we study our victims with great piety. And supposedly teach them solutions to the problems we continue to cause for them. Western people studying globalization's horrific effects, or rape in Africa, or world poverty are doing so under the assumption that such things can be dealt with through some social mechanistic means, through analysis and unbiased reason and rational value-free science. Or by a network of officially sanctioned agencies.

For years I have wanted to see the opposite take place. To see well fed, educated Americans learn from the poor of the earth. Do what Gandhi advised, let the poor be the teachers. Go among them with nothing, one set of clothing and no money, keep your mouth shut, and do your best not to affect anything (which is impossible, I know. But you can come, as they say, "close enough for government work.")

Then just let the world happen to you, like they do in the so-called "passive societies," instead of trying to happen to it in typical Western fashion. Not trying to "improve" things. Maybe practice milpa agriculture with Mayans on the Guatemalan border, watching corn grow for three months. Fish in a lonely dugout, sun-up to sun-down, in the dying reefs of the Caribbean, with only a meal or two of fish as your reward. Do such things for a month or two.

First you will experience boredom, then comes an internal psychic violence and anger, much like the experience of zazen, or sitting meditation, as the layers of your mind conditioning peel away. Don't quit, keep at it, endure it, to the end. And when you return you will find that deeply experiencing a non-conditioned reality changes things forever. What you have experienced will animate whatever intellectual life you have developed. Or negate much of it. But in serious, intelligent people, experiencing non-manufactured reality usually gives lifelong meaning and insight to the work. You will have experienced the eternal verities of the world and mankind at ground zero. And you will find that the healthy social structures our well intentioned Western minds seek are already inherent in the psyche of mankind, but imprisoned. And the startling realization that you and I are the unknowing captors.

It is always hard for me to put this in words: come to my country, but don't try to fix anything. Live with us, listen, see what we're doing here, have fun. Then go back to yours and change it.

the memory bookcase

The cowboy has a big wooden bookcase full of memories. It's the second thing people notice when they come to the house. The first, of course, is the enormity of the trees in the living room, but the second is almost always the bookcase.

Other than books (Java programming books, Bob Dylan books, Calvin and Hobbes books), the shelves contain a complicated and fragile arrangement of mementos from at least 20 years of my husband's life. There's political pamphlets dated in the 80's, there's stickers with environmentalist slogans, a can of coke, a box of lifesavers, a mug printed with the face of an unknown child who now is now probably a teenager, an empty box of cold medicine, and what can only be described as a stained glass hen.

Our visitors normally look at the bookcase with genuine surprise, pick a couple of salient items, ask one or two questions, and quickly move onto less intimate conversations. Except children of course, who can't believe a house inhabited by boring adults can have a Matryoshka doll, a luminous spinning top, a Disney lunch box, a Parcheesi board and a heart-shaped chocolate box embossed with not one, but two Elvises smiling and playing guitar like it's 1957.

Now, what I'm describing here is just what lies in the surface of the bookcase. I would not dare to move things, search for things, rearrange things, and of course, I would never dare removing things. First, because this is the way my husband likes to remember his wonderful life, full of friends and travels and strong emotional bonds: with romantic attachment to small, random objects. Second, because I'm afraid to pull out the wrong thing and die, buried under the weight of his life before me.

amalucada vida

* This long weekend was supposed to be all about work. As it turns out, we can't stop the celebratory impulses of others, and we end up going to BBQs and playing with frozen margaritas in our hands, thinking anxiously about deadlines and other inconveniences.

* Jackie stayed with us for a week and we had fun having her. We are now positive we're great dog sitters, not so great dog owners. I had the chance to recall all my failures with previous dogs, the cats that barely survived me, the numerous plants I killed with negligence and distraction. So there: I can barely keep myself fed and entertained.

* Doing a mind-numbing, repetitive, endless job during many consecutive weekends is not working out. I keep making plans in my head: when I finish this I will start doing collage again, I'll reward myself with a video game, I'll start a video blog, I'll write a fucking novel. I just need to finish this.

lo que viene

Sometimes you ask life to give you everything.  And then, life actually gives you quite a bit, and you get scared and neurotic and start thinking when the spell is going to break.  There is a cost, there is a fault, there is misery hiding somewhere, waiting.

I have asked life to give me love, food and beauty, and not much more.  Some peace,  a good city to live in, enough money to put food on the table, time to make new friends and write.

And lately, despite my efforts to get involved in complicated jobs, in stressful projects, in making more money, in suffering a little bit more for the sake of literature... well, I've failed.  I've got exactly what I asked for: love, flavour, distance. I can't help but wonder what  the price is going to be.

tres, de este lado.

• Anxiety. I've been waiting for a call the whole week.  I'm tired and unable to concentrate. There's just too many possibilities, too many options.  It feels just like walking into a store where you like everything, you browse for a while and all things start looking boring and generic, and you go home with nothing. I want someone else to make this decision for me. 
• I'm starting to wonder if I should be writing in  English about daily life.  El Oso is trying to build a "glocal" life in Buenos Aires, and writing in Spanish is partially his way of doing that.  All I have in English is work,  the small intimate language I use with the cowboy, the tiny interactions I have in the street. Perhaps a literary narration of the world would help me appropriate this language that still feels so detached and artificial. 
• Someone jumped off a building today, in one of the busiest parts of the city. Some people say he had their wrists slit when he jumped.  The news never report those, cause they fear other people may get crazy ideas and spike the suicide numbers. People live such complicated lives and yet, as humans, we're annoyingly simple.
  

soup

José García Esquinero, owner of the only bar in the alameda, still wakes up to the explosive sound of the bullet that he remembers only briefly. He sees his own hand trying to hold a thick soup of blood and teeth particles. and not much more. After being revived in the hospital by the prayers of all women of Santa Lucía, good and bad, he came back to town preceded by the rumours of a solid gold new jaw, complete with a perfect, revengeful smile. In the middle of the night, with the taste of fire still in his tongue, he gargles with salt water in the bathroom. Marisa is still sleeping in his bed. Life was turning out to be more predictable this time around.