Sunday, April 20, 2008

In Iguazú

This is a journal entry from my trip to Argentina in December, 2005. Iguazú, in the extreme northeast corner of Argentina, is home to a national park full of enormous waterfalls. The closest town on the Argentine side of the border is Puerto Iguazú, 11 miles away down a scraggly jungle highway. Puerto Iguazú depends almost totally on tourism, but at this time of year (December is early summer in Argentina; the tourist season begins in January) the town was mostly deserted.

The bus left Buenos Aires late in the afternoon. As darkness slowly fell, we rolled out of the city with its skyscrapers, north through the grasslands, and into the region called Mesopotamia. When I woke up, we were in the tropics. Hazy morning air tinged blue with wood smoke settled sluggishly over a road the color and texture of powdered brick. Here nature was vibrantly, menacingly green; stands of gnarled trees loomed on the hilltops, threatening to come down in the night and strangle the flimsy tin and wood shacks huddled in the valleys below. Humanity barely had a foothold here. A heard of big-humped zebu cattle grazed head-down in the grass. A truck full of men out joyriding raced alongside the bus and then shot past us. Old people plodded along the highway with a huge baskets of vegetables slung over their backs. They walked alone, stared straight ahead, and barely noticed as the bus rumbled past.

At 11 we arrived in Puerto Iguazú, a sleepy town with wide, cobbled alleys and the whiff of desperate underemployment. At the bus station, bored men with heavy cheeks and sweat-stained shirts leaned on their cabs. They hounded the new arrivals and asked, “Where are you going?” Housewives called out from their porches, offering their spare bedrooms. Native children with big sad eyes (the well-practiced kind you see in Sally Struthers ads) proferred strings of jewelry and flimsy wooden bows. We passed them all and took a short walk to our hostel, Residencial Uno (no relation to the pizzeria). 

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Sunday, April 13, 2008

On Drinking Absinthe

This is a journal entry I originally made in February 2007, about my first experience with absinthe. I was on a serious Hemingway kick (I had just read A Moveable Feast), so I shelled out $150 to have a bottle shipped over from England (this is before it became legal again in the States). I almost wrote “smuggled over” just there, but honestly I doubt customs gave two shits about my bottle of half-assed contraband. Anyway, John was out of town for the weekend, so I got my supplies together, laid out a notebook and pen, and wrote down whatever came to mind. I started drinking about 9:00 PM. The journal starts at 9:25. I can’t remember if there was an earlier page that I lost or not.

c.9:25
I got hot, so went out onto the porch. Very crisp, very nice. Tried to photograph lights, but they kept blurring into long boomerangs. Do not buy what they say about absinthe causing a “clear-headed drunk”. I feel drunk, unqualified.

Prior experience tells me that I can concentrate while drinking most anything, it’s just tougher. I keep thinking of “synthathol” from Star Trek. It gets you drunk, but its effects can be “easily disregarded”. Wouldn’t that be nice. (Ed note: Urgh. Drunk and nerdy.)

9:32
The cat was sniffing at the door out to the deck, but he couldn’t find a way through the screen. That’s good; I’m in no shape to chase him.

Seem to be getting drunker with every sip. It is wrong to want to combine pizza and absinthe?

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Friday, April 11, 2008

On Relics (and Foreskin)

Earlier tonight, I was contemplating my lost foreskin (in a purely philosophical context, of course). I pulled up Wikipedia and found that while either 55.9% or 79% of American males are circumcised, less than 10% of Britons are, with presumably similar numbers in the rest of Europe. The Wikipedia article on circumcision also reminded me of one of the more curious tidbits of Catholicism, the Holy Prepuce.

A relic is a piece of holy bric-a-brac that devout people journey hundreds of miles to see. A prepuce is the ring of foreskin left over after the moyel does his thing, and the capital-p Prepuce was allegedly harvested from Baby Gee himself. Unfortunately, Jesus took the midnight train to Georgia heaven, leaving very few pieces of himself behind for morbid Catholics to collect and trade with their friends. Hence, authentic Christ memorabilia is limited to things like his foreskin and his umbilical cord, plus stuff that touched him, like the spear he was stabbed with while being crucified, a sponge that somebody used to give him water, and the odd burial shroud or walking stick.

Fun Fact:

Catholicism recognizes three classes of relic, including:

• First-class relics: Pieces of saints and other bigwigs, plus all of the Christ accoutrements mentioned earlier
• Second-class relics: Things owned, used by, or thrown at saints (the last one only counts if the saint was martyred)
• Third-class relics: Anything that has touched a first-class or second-class relic

Fun weekend activity: Find a church where a saint is buried (saints tombs’ count as second-class relics) and visit it with a supply of frisbees. Touch each frisbee to the tomb. Go to the park and hurl frisbees at people. Yell, “Look out, bitches! That shit is holy!”

So anyway, there was the Holy Prepuce. Or possibly eight of them, or twelve, or fourteen, or eighteen.  A piece of foreskin is not readily identifiable, so anybody with a spare bit of shrivelled skin (or a stale Frito; that’s probably what it looked like anyway) was a contender for the title of “owner of Christ’s wang helmet”. Charlemagne gave the pope a Prepuce when he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, and King Baldwin of Jerusalem picked one up as a souvenir on the First Crusade. Arguments ensued. Finally, one particular prepuce (in Calcata, north of Rome) was declared the “official” one, and anyone who came out to see it was offered a 10-year indulgence, or get-out-of-sin-free pass (this was the Medieval equivalent of “free pretzel day” at your local baseball stadium).

In the 1800s, some workman was knocking down walls at Charroux Cathedral in France, when he discovered a box containing another forgotten famous foreskin. This got the debate going all over again, and in 1900 the Church declared that anyone arguing publicly about Christ’s foreskin would be excommunicated. Later they upgraded the punishment to excommunication and shunning. Official Jesus Foreskin Removal Day (not the actual name) was removed from the Church calendar, and that was the end of that.

Oh, one more thing. The “O.G.” foreskin in Calcata was stolen from the cathedral in 1983. Somewhere right now, a black market art enthusiast is smiling up at his mantel quietly contemplating his own little piece of history: a 2,000-year-old knob warmer. Well done indeed.

Saturday, April 05, 2008

On Eating Meat

Mexican for dinner last night. Had Tilapia San Lucas. What the hell is Tilapia? Some kind of carp?
Wikipedia sez: “Tilapia (pronounced /təˌlɑpiə/) is the common name for nearly a hundred species of cichlid fishes from the tilapiine cichlid tribe.”. Mm-hrm.

Anyway, the fish tasted funny. Mostly fish-like, but with hints of pond water, algae, and undertones of green-brown floating shit. It wasn’t bad exactly, but I felt like I was tasting everything that fish had ever eaten. It was like tasting the food chain (that would be the Simpsons food chain, with everything pointing toward humans).

So that got me thinking, what a drag it would be if you could always taste everything you had eaten, and what it had eaten, and so on down the chain until you reached the dung beetles and biting flies. Thank god for our modern genetically-modified animals and their tasteless diets of sterile corn and sheep brains.

Monday, March 17, 2008

On Never Finishing Anything

In my life, I’ve started close to 1000 projects, and never finished any of them. This is one of those.