Suffering The Benz

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Wednesday, October 17

It’s been raining nonstop for 36 hours here in Uvita. So I figure if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

As long as I remember
The rain’s been comin’ down
Clouds of mystery pourin’
Confusion on the ground

Good men through the ages
Tryin’ to find the sun
And I wonder, still I wonder
Who’ll stop the rain
— Credence Clearwater Revival

It’s Raining In Love
I don’t know what it is,
but I distrust myself
when I start to like a girl
a lot. 

It makes me nervous.
I don’t say the right things
or perhaps I start
to examine,
evaluate,
compute
what I am saying. 

 If I say, “Do you think it’s going to rain?”
 and she says, “I don’t know,”
 I start thinking : Does she really like me? 

 In other words
 I get a little creepy. 

 A friend of mine once said,
“It’s twenty times better to be friends
with someone
than it is to be in love with them.” 

I think he’s right and besides,
it’s raining somewhere, programming flowers
and keeping snails happy.
That’s all taken care of. 

BUT 

if a girl likes me a lot
and starts getting real nervous
and suddenly begins asking me funny questions
and looks sad if I give the wrong answers
and she says things like,
“Do you think it’s going to rain?”
and I say, “It beats me,”
and she says, “Oh,”
and looks a little sad
at the clear blue California sky,
I think : Thank God, it’s you, baby, this time
instead of me.
— Richard Brautigan

Bleak House
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
— Charles Dickens

Rain Travel
I wake in the dark and remember
it is the morning when I must start
by myself on the journey
I lie listening to the black hour
before dawn and you are
still asleep beside me while
around us the trees full of night lean
hushed in their dream that bears
us up asleep and awake then I hear
drops falling one by one into
the sightless leaves and I
do not know when they began but
all at once there is no sound but rain
and the stream below us roaring
away into the rushing darkness
— W.S. Merwin

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Monday, October 15

When I returned from my trip to the States, I went over to the pineapple plants to harvest one since I knew they’d be really ripe. That’s when I realized someone had munched an entire pineapple, leaving only the nub still attached to the plant. My first suspect was that massive iguana who hangs out in the parking area.

Nope.

I went down to open the gate for Gian, who was coming by to take me to refill the propane tank that fuels the stovetop and I saw a coatimundi bolt from the pineapple plants and bound over the fence. The raccoon-like bastard had started working on another ripe, delicious pineapple. So I picked two others that he hadn’t gotten to yet and then pulled the one he’d started working on, cut away the part closest to where he’d been munching and diced it up for myself. It briefly ran through my mind that maybe the critter had rabies or something, but screw it. I’ll teach him to mess with my pineapples, even if it leaves me foaming at the mouth and fearing water. I tossed what was left where the agouti hang out, and they were quick to find it and finish it off.

Overall, I took it easy yesterday. I’m going to return to my work on The Book this morning, but I wanted to take a day to decompress. Unfortunately, I started reading John Kenneth Turner’s Barbarous Mexico, which is thoroughly depressing. Turner was a socialist muckraker who traveled to Mexico several times in 1908 to report on conditions under the Porfiriato. He poses as a Gringo with millions to invest in the de facto slave plantations. Early in the book, he writes the following prophetic passage:

Mexicans of all classes and affiliations agree that their country is on the verge of a revolution in favor of democracy; if not a revolution in the time of (Porfirio) Diaz, for Diaz is old and is expected soon to pass, then a revolution after Diaz.

After reading his accounts of conditions on an agave plantation in the Yucatan and his reporting on conditions at the tobacco farms in Valle Nacional, it’s not hard to understand why the country exploded in bloody, chaotic civil war in 1910. A system was in place to funnel people into indentured servitude in both places, though this really was outright slavery, as Turner points out. Yaqui Indians, Mayans, petty criminals and working people who thought they were signing up for decent jobs and wages all were hoodwinked into signing contracts that put them on these plantations with no ability to escape. It was systemic, with government officials, the police and the owners of the reservations conspiring to work these people, literally, to death to keep costs low. People were little more than fodder for this capitalist nightmare. Turner writes the following about why the slave owners made women grind corn by hand to feed the other slaves rather than use machines:

I asked the presidente of Valle Nacional why the planters did not purchase cheap mills for grinding the corn, or why they did not combine and buy a mill among them, instead of breaking several hundred backs yearly in the work. ‘Women are cheaper than machines,’ was the reply.

His reporting was impressive, and he names names, quoting the perpetrators of these atrocities, who, in their insatiable greed, told him everything believing he was about to invest tons of money in their operations to make them even richer. We often look at the murderous rampages of Mao in China and Stalin in Russia to rightly condemn the horrors of communism. This book makes it clear capitalist economies were just as quick — and brutal — in grinding people under foot to attain their goals.

If you’re interested in the Mexican revolution, which is a fascinating story, Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast currently is focusing on it. It’s well done and Duncan is doing a solid job of following the myriad threads of the conflict in a way that’s easy to follow. It also points out yet another instance of American intervention in the Americas, largely to protect the interests of corporations that were benefitting greatly from the excesses of the Porfiriato. It’s a good reminder of why Mexicans are so leery of their neighbors to the north.

Turner’s Barbarous Mexico is out of print, best I can tell, but it is in the public domain and available free via the Internet Archive and I think you also can download it from Amazon for .99 cents.

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Wednesday, October 10

I woke up in the United States this morning for the first time in two months. The trip thus far has been uneventful. I hired a driver, Fernando, who got me safely and quickly from Uvita to San José, where I spent the night in a Marriott Courtyard near the airport. Nice hotel. The flight out was no problem and the only complaint I have on the trip thus far was a long line at passport control coming into Miami, including an asshole French Canadian who decided to just walk past everyone in line until he got to … me. I stepped in front of him and he got a little indignant. But he wasn’t willing to push the issue. He went through after I did.

I’m flying out this morning for Iowa via Chicago. More fun and thrills in airports. This is a lifestyle that I don’t miss in any way, shape or form. I think there was one year when I worked for Scripps that I traveled 40+ weeks. (Some of those trips were one-day jaunts, but still … 40 weeks of airports and hotels and crap food. I’m still not sure how I survived that.) So far, my ankle is holding up really well. It was sore after yesterday’s travel but not abnormally so.

I also started reading The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius. It was written in Latin in the second century A.D. and I did a little research on translations after initially downloading the 1566 translation by William Adlington from Project Gutenberg. I just wasn’t up for wading through archaic English spelling and style while trying to read it, and I also wanted a more contemporary take since the book is pretty bawdy in spots and I didn’t want to read  through the gauze of some translator trying mightily not to offend.

Enter Sarah Ruden. Thus far, I’m really impressed with her translation. I have both her version and Adlington’s on my Kindle so I’ve jumped back and forth a bit to see how they compare. Very similar, but her language is much more fun and interesting. I’m glad I opted for it.

This book is the story that inspired Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Instead of a cockroach, the narrator here is turned into a donkey when he messes with witchcraft that he doesn’t fully understand. It’s an early take on the picaresque novel that Don Quixote, Tom Jones and Confederacy of Dunces all took inspiration from. I also am working on a sub-theme in The Book that is inspired by this story. So there’s that.

Onward to Iowa. Hopefully, no one will turn me into an ass. Or a bigger ass, as the case may be …

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Saturday, October 6

After five days of pretty much nonstop rain, the skies cleared last night in a spectacular way. There have only been one or two nights since I arrived here (almost 8 weeks ago now) that we’ve had clear skies in the evening.

As if to make a great situation better, the power went out, creating blackout conditions. I walked out into the parking lot to star gaze. There are few things more humbling that standing beneath the stars in pitch-black conditions. That almost made all the rain we endured worthwhile.

The lucky streak continued this morning with brilliant sunrise filled with bird songs and the distant sound of surf. I was struck with inspiration and awoke at about 4 a.m. and started writing. I do that pretty frequently. The sun rises here every day around 5:30 and I love to sit there and listen to the jungle wake up while the light starts to filter in through the Treehouse. After all that rain, it was wonderful to walk out into a sunny morning after I was done writing. I guess the bad news is the inspiration created more complication in The Book. I was running parallel story lines. Now I have three, including a retelling of the Joe Magarac tall tale. It’s coming together in increasing strange yet interwoven ways.

I read Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The River” the other day for the first time in years. What an astounding story driven by her typical themes of the Southern grotesque and redemption. Her ability to craft rich, complex characters is second to none I have an anthology of all her short stories and I almost kept reading, but her work is so dense I decided to move on to something else. So I picked up Conrad’s Lord Jim, which I made a run at once and ran out of steam. I’m faring much better this time but still believe he should have made it a novella, ending with the trial Jim is subjected to. I haven’t finished yet, but the tale of Jim’s years in limbo after the Patna incident feels anticlimactic thus far. I love the way Conrad works the pace of the story, sometimes entering the “ripping yarn” territory and other times slowing down to dive deep into the characters’ inner impressions and motivations. That quality always floored me when reading Heart of Darkness. If you just pull it apart and put it in an outline, it’s an action-packed adventure tale. But he intentionally retards the pace, forcing the reader to turn inward and focus on the motivations and subtexts behind the action more than the action itself.

Gian swung by on Thursday and took me out to a resort south of here where I booked a room for when Lara comes to visit in early November. She’ll be here for about 5 days and then we’ll return to the States together on Nov. 7. Initially, we were going to go the discount route, but it will have been almost three months since we’ve seen each other so I figured, what they hell. Let’s go 4-star. Cristal Ballena definitely is that. It has a wonderful view of the ocean. While I was checking out the room options it was raining, obscuring the ocean in a thick, misty haze that was every bit as stunning as a clear Pacific view. Vultures circled lazily and a pair of macaws squawked there way through the rain toward the ocean, disappearing into the murk.

I’ve decided to name my favorite agouti — he is now Fela Agouti after the late, great African music legend Fela Kuti. He joins Chuckles the Gecko as my constant companions here.

This week, I head back to the states for a business meeting, but I’m not swinging through Ohio. I return here late Friday night, but I have to admit, I’m greatly looking forward to being able to walk into a store and asking for something in English and being understood. I’m just hoping I can navigate the airports without a setback for my ankle, which continues to improve in its glacial way.