streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 9:05 pm on March 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Gypsy, Romania, street people   

  White Trash 

  The sketchy guy in the bus station is always there, like the legendary hitchhiker, white trash, twitching and pacing, shoulders pinned back by the force of gravity, occupying some form dictated by his inner child on drugs.  Back and forth without a gyroscope he cuts his nervous system loose on an unsuspecting populace, guided by some inner GPS.  It’s the same guy wherever I go- blood-shot eyes, unshaven face, hair matted from tortured sleep or lack thereof.  Go to Timisoara and it’s still the same guy, except he’s waiting for a train instead of a bus that’ll never come, part Gypsy and all a blur, pencil lines on white paper, cheap animation from unemployed sketch artists, cheap wine on cracked pavement.  It’s good to see a time capsule of evolution.  These are the guys that scoured the world in search of fame and fortune and fresh femmes, everything to gain and nothing to lose, drunk and scurvied and dripping with gonorrhea.  They changed the world in somebody else’s image and likeness.

   

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  hardie karges 9:33 pm on March 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: communism ( 21 ), czech   

  Communism 

  Eastern Europe is losing weight fast, the dead weight of Bolshevik dictatorship, commonplace communism, and ironic curtains.  This is quickly being replaced by common criminals, Mafia protection, and tinted shades to soften the glare of an all-too-bright future.  Paint the scene in yellow and green if you want it to mean what I think it means.  Save the gray for the drab old cold of Communism, long given over to rigor mortis on the fast track to rot.  Prague rocks from the underbelly up; experimental music and flying cows with psychedelic milk dot the landscape.  Bohemian boozers give their western Celtic brothers a run for their beer money in the race to drink each other under the table.  It’s a Bohemian rhapsody, complete with nods and winks.  Czechs bounce back from a shuddered past, an iron curtain and a blind smile, and try to forget their history as slaves for whatever marauding band happened to pass through.  Now I know just a little of how it feels to live in the Communist bloc, cell block apartments and fare-thee-well projects.  They are quickly being converted to tourist accommodations by enterprising individuals.  It is sobering to think that Communism intended to unite the world under the banner of heavy industry, gray skies, and mass pollution, regardless of local conditions and traditions.  Only when that world started to disappear, being replaced by the information industry, did communism itself begin to crumble.
   
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  hardie karges 10:32 pm on March 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Jeopardy, Mexico ( 7 )   

  Mexican Jeopardy 

  On Mexican ‘Jeopardy’ the contestants always start at the bottom highest-priced end of a category and work their way upward toward the easy questions.  It’s as if the correct answer to a question ultimately comes from luck, not skill or knowledge, certainly not something that might be gained from thirty minutes of practice and familiarity with the subject.  People wonder why the Third World is the world of poverty and start pointing fingers of accusation at rich countries and rich corporations that ‘suck out’ the resources of the rest of the world while leaving nothing in return.  At the same time they ignore the reluctance of many of those same people to improve their individual and group situations by incremental steps and simple logic, the powers of two, double your money, then double it again, then so on to the limits of one’s ability.  This is the conservative approach to progress, conserving what already exists while moving forward one step at the time, best exemplified in reproduction.  Gene-splicing is a shortcut to nowhere.  The power of reproduction is the power of twos, in fractional terms, two unite and become one in the flesh, over and over to infinity.

   
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  hardie karges 11:01 pm on March 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: chat, Peru Thailand, sex ( 39 )   

  CHAT 

  Chattiness is a national personality trait that I value highly, an open society without pretenses or pretensions.  This is not something to be taken for granted, especially between sexes.  In fact, in many, if not most, cultures, men and women can’t simply meet and chat each other up casually.  That might lead to bigger and better things, after all.  Yep.  Or maybe they can, but they don’t, for lack of opportunity or appropriate setting.  Village communism is the flip side, not bad necessarily, in and of itself, but so mathematically imprecise as to be maddeningly annoying.  If you get ahead of the pack, then you can be sure that every one else will have his hand out looking for a piece of the action.  By the same token, you have the right to call on others for help when you need it, but for some people that’s simply not the way of life.  Still the trade-off is largely worth the downside.  Too often smiles are forgotten in the transactions of existence, the currency of personality, the personality of life.  What’s the good of life if it has to be stressed or strained, coaxed through filters and reduced to mush?  Not surprisingly, the countries best at this are the least macho countries, like Thailand and Peru.  Also not surprisingly, these are countries with beautiful women, an obsession with sex, and a total dearth of logic.

   
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  hardie karges 12:44 am on March 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: New Mexico ( 2 ), Peru ( 5 )   

  Peruvian Gray 

  Peru’s northern coast is so bleak that it becomes transcendent.  Like the night defining blackness or a snowstorm defining whiteness, Lima and most of the coast define grayness.  There are places where the sky and the sea and the sand meet in a continuum of grayness that is seamless, the perfect background for something, like maybe a shopping mall or a carnival or a hallucination.  It reminded me of New Mexico.  That day way back when in New Mexico was the only true whiteout I’ve ever seen or felt, driving through hundreds of miles of landscape almost undifferentiated by whiteness.  When I lost one of my snow chains I couldn’t even stop in the single non-snow-drifted lane.  When I needed to piss I couldn’t even use the snow-drifted exit ramp for fear I’d never get back.  So on I went, hours and hours in a little capsule through the whiteness flying on instruments, using dead reckoning to plot my course.  The only reason I didn’t get vertigo was because there was a road under me.  At least I think there was; I never actually saw black asphalt.  It only changed when I got to the Colorado state line, where the road was totally clear all the way to Denver.  Apparently New Mexicans don’t like to work in the snow.  How can they expect me to sacrifice myself in the service of industry if they aren’t willing?  At least I got to see the OTHER Las Vegas.

   
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  hardie karges 4:34 am on March 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Colonization, South America ( 2 )   

  DNA of Culture 

  Caribbean culture seems not altogether different from that of Brazil, while the South American Pacific coast seems like a lost tribe of Europeans still attached to the homeland by memory, and extending into Argentina and Uruguay as if following the lines on a thermometer.  This is the DNA of climate, genetic trails left by temperature choices, the easiest example being the transfer of a division between northern and southern Europe into a similar division in America, albeit with Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians re-mixed back into the Americanized English lot.  The same is true of Italians with their Portuguese and Spanish counterparts.  French go both ways, if they go at all.  The best example might be the Dutch, who colonized the Mediterranean-like coast of South Africa before the native African, but tropical, Bantu-speakers ever felt the need to go that far.  The bananas that sustained their culture and facilitated its rapid expansion, had earlier been introduced from Asia.

   
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  hardie karges 4:27 am on March 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Caribbean, sex ( 39 ), travel ( 14 ), Venezuela.   

  Wander Love 

  I judge a country by the beauty of its women. Even after thirty years of travel, there’s still a lump in my throat, still a lump in my pants at the thrill and fear of landing in a country for the first time.  Unfortunately, Venezuela and the Caribbean don’t seem to have the lithe blithe femmes carrying a tray of fruit on their heads like you’d want them to, all smiles and sex and shortness of breath.  In actuality, the only women I’ve ever seen with fruit on their heads are the Hindu Balinese ladies on their way to temple with offerings, legs strapped together with tube skirts for virgins, sex the last thing on their minds.  Venezuela is part of the Caribbean segment of Latino culture, hot, kinky-haired, and thick of speech, akin to Panama and the Spanish Antilles, and Central America to a lesser extent, not surprising since it shares the same tub with them.  In Panama, salesmen line the streets in front of their stores, clapping their hands in short staccato bursts, as if that sense or urgency will inspire increased sales.  In Venezuela stores have long surrendered their fronts to the throngs of ambulatory vendors appropriating the public right-of-way for their private benefit to the point where the sidewalks are almost impossibly impassable.  This seems to be a growing trend, even in countries like Venezuela and Thailand that have technically left the Third World, as least in terms of GNP.  Unfortunately the flight of the filthy rich obscures the plight of the filthy poor.  The rich get richer and the poor get babies.    

   
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  hardie karges 10:57 pm on February 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: crime ( 2 ), Customs, Panama   

  Nickels and Dimes 

  The Casco Viejo, the old town in Panama City, was no better.  That was right after Customs strip-searched me GETTING ON the plane, so I was still a little fragile.  First thing, some guy in Panama lunges for my bag.  I pulled away quickly; I’m not THAT fragile.  The next day I looked out my window and saw a Panamanian woman holding on to the strap of her bag that had just been slashed, and crying.  I flagged a taxi and boogied.  Mexico wasn’t so bad, except for Oaxaca, though I’ve heard Mexico City is now one of the worst in the world.  Most of my problem in Oaxaca was with parking my truck on the street.  I think it got hit every time.  I don’t think it ever got hit in Mexico City.   Yes, I used to drive in Mexico City.  I even drove in Taxco once, up and up and up, all the way until I found a way to come back down.  But the worst place for larceny was Colombia.  After I got set up on the little drug farce, nothing happened again to me, but it did to many that I met, some under the influence of perfume.  In Colombia, rumor was that they had a school for pickpockets.  They were good.  Mostly I smoked dope there, anywhere and everywhere, hanging with the homies.  I‘ve never been mugged anywhere, or physically assaulted for any reason.

   
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  hardie karges 3:59 am on February 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Alan Garcia, crime ( 2 ), Peru ( 5 )   

  South American Disease 

  Peru used to be the larceny capital in the world, after Colombia, of course.  I used to walk down the streets of Lima zigzag, just so that if I saw someone else doing the same, I’d know something’s wrong.  I’d walk with a fistful of coins in my hand, just in case I had to take a swing at someone, there’d be some weight behind my punch.  As if it weren’t bad enough that a hundred bucks would be a bag-full of those god-forsaken intis that passed for currency during the first Garcia regime, then you’d have to walk through a den of thieves with them.  Garcia told the Gringos to fuck off, so why shouldn’t everyone else?  While standing at the edge of a crowd in the Plaza San Martin, a thief riddled through my shoulder-bag so fast that if you’d stopped the video at the point I realized I’d been hit, I probably wouldn’t have been able to pick the guy out of the crowd.  He went for the main compartment and settled for a side one all in the space of a few seconds, without getting anything.  That leather bag seemed to attract them.  I could just feel eyes casing it out constantly, or was I just imagining things?  So I decided to leave the bag in my room.  The next day a Peruvian I’d never met asked me, “Where’s your bag?”  I could’ve died right then and there, convinced that the world was an evil place.  The first time I’d been to Lima, it was just an overgrown village really, naïve and sympathetic.  This was a far cry from that.  The last time I was there, six weeks ago, it had almost reverted to its former innocence, pollos a la broaster and all that.

   
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  hardie karges 9:46 pm on February 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: capitalism ( 26 ), Commnism ( 2 ), Cuba ( 3 ), Fidel Castro   

  Fiel y Castro 

  Cuba’s good ol’ Faithful Reliable is looking a little beleaguered behind the whiskers these days, but what’s an old Communist to do?  Get capitalism after all these years?  Set up maquiladoras along the Florida Straits?  Vietnamese, except for Uncle Ho, were no-names.  East Germany, Romania, the Slav countries, even Russia itself, hardly a hero in the lot.  Castro is a NAME.  Cuba will probably have to await his funeral to make any political changes.  I’ll get there sooner or later.