Female Presidents, Self-Immolation And Fast Food Lovin'

So back to some things that have to do with politics (here we go)...just a few minutes ago the polls closed here in Argentina and the Argentinians have just voted thier first woman president into power! Yay for progress! Cristina Fernandez de Kirschner is the wife of the current president, and she has just beat out another woman, Elisa Carrio, and a number of other candidates to replace him. It is interesting to witness this election for a number of reasons...I will name only a couple here. First of all, it is mandatory to vote here in AR. You don't just feel like it and go. Everyone goes or something bad will happen. (I haven't figured out what that is yet.) I was walking around the streets today which are usually pretty quiet on sunday afternoon and they were shot through with an energy that felt a lot like excitement. I watched people laughing with each other in the waiting lines and wearing nametags and gathering for coffee and mate in the cafes after finishing. No alcohol was allowed to be served today. While watching TV with my family for the last few hours, nothing too crazy happened except for the cop who got overheated and passed out in the exit of one of the polling locations. There has been a lot of speculation about the statistics of the election...my family here swears that there is a lot of fraud happening at the polls.

A second thing that is interesting is that through its association, Argentina is thought of as a machisimo country. A place where men whistle at women and maybe smack them on the tush as they walk by and the women work hard to look hot and don't do much else. Not only is this a false assumption, (despite the presence of whistling men and incredibly beautiful women...) but even considering the things that seem conservative, (i.e., abortion is illegal, there is a huge gap between rich and poor.) it is still very interesting that more and more countries are having women be the heads of state while we in the US stutter when we think about Hillary being the prez. Now, I know that there is more to this than just Hillary, but does it not seem a little bit prehistoric and male-centric that she is the first real female contender for president that we have had? I am not going into this too far, but it makes me think about it and goddamnit, it's time to break out of this no-minority, no-women thing that we have established as an unwritten cultural rule in our country. (And why, aside from latent racism, fear of brown-ness and possibly nepotism, would you not want to teach your citizens the language of a people who will soon be the largest minority group in the country? Yes I am talking about spanish, and not 'cuz I am learning it right now...) To put it simply, women are good right? Yes. Is their place only in the home? No. Can they lead people? Of course. Are they constantly comparing thier penises metaphorically using missiles, guns, footballs, golf clubs and battle terminology? No. Could this be a good thing that could help shape the future of our country and that of a world that we so roughly mishandle currently? Damn straight. So c'mon people now, (smile on yer...sister!;)) think for a second and let's make some changes to catch up with countries that we like to think are behind us....

...I am changing the subject slightly now...One year ago, on november the 3rd, a man named Malachi Ritscher lit himself on fire and burned to death in front of a major landmark in downtown Chicago. His self-immolation was in protest to a war that he saw as being immoral and illegal and his statement with his life in such a manner was intended to jolt the sleeping, sheeplike masses into thought and action. As is normal in our country, this kind of news was panned, placed in a couple newspapers in the back pages and the lid was placed over it so that it couldn't generate any momentum. Probably you have never even heard of this event, or if you did it was probably from me cause I got all excited about it. Do I really think that even if this story had hit the headlines it would have gotten people to take action against this war? Not really. Or it is doubtful at best. Not going to go into these reasons either...but as your friend, who cares very much about the world in which we live and the people who we share it with, (I know I sound like a damn hippie right now) I would ask you to take a moment on the 3rd of november, or right now if you think you will forget, to think about this war and this American way of life...think about the actions of the body of government that is said to represent you...think about the destruction of lives that is underway in this very moment...and think about a person who was so convinced of the treachery of the situation that he decided to take his own life in a way that was sure to get attention...and then sadly it didn't. That is all. You can read about Malachi Ritscher at the site, www.iheardyoumalachi.com and you can read his shocking "mission statement" at www.savagesound.com/gallery99.htm or you can just google his name, it is worth a couple minutes.

So aside from all this jazz, things are great down here. Weather's good, people are good. I was presented with a classic "latin-love" scenario yesterday that was so funny I gotta recount it here. I was stationed at a cafe near Corrientes and Pellegrini, minding my own business and having a cortado, when I spied what at first seemed like just another one of the many public diplays of affection that you see in the latin world. Then I noticed something that made me laugh. They were sitting on an outdoor McDonalds bench and he was feeding her french fries...one by one, very slowly and sensually. Then they would suck face for a minute, and then she would feed him bites of hamburger and then they would take turns feeding each other a straw of Coca Cola. This is all par-for-course except for the fact that it is goddamn McDonald's food that is the centerpeice for this escapade of romance...you're rockin' it man but you're giving her freaking french fries!!! Damn that shit was whacked. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain is echoing the voice of any and every girl..."yeah, but it's soooo romantic!" Touche...you got me on that one.......earlier I wrote what ended up being a little bit random and way longer than I thought it would be, I'll include that as a separate blog. You'll see why. Later! Go Red Sox! And oh yeah, happy birthday Ani!!!

And Then A Sunrise Happened By

There is something about the sound of vehicles in transit during the moments surrounding the rising of the sun that evokes strong emotion implicating mortality. Something that captures the essence of the transcience of our lives. (What a way to start the blog eh?) This morning I awoke to the thunder of Carlos Pellegrini Avenue out my window. Instead of re-applying my earplugs and burying my head under a pillow or two like normal, I pulled open the window and separated the blinds to look out across the Argentinian Autobahn. What I saw goes into the category of what I am refering to...a bright but hazy golden-orange glow punctuated by the cold, smoky, city air, the sound of squeeking brakes, deisel engines, and tires thumping across the cracks between the pavement. These are all qualities of a scene that I can easily describe, what I am getting at is something in between all these qualities, invisible in the way that our souls are invisible, they are there, we acknowledge that they are, but if we were asked to point them out, we couldn't do it. I can remember when I was in Spain, walking El Camino De Santiago, there were many mornings when I would be up and walking long before the dawn in attempt to avoid trudging along in the heat of the midday sun. Out in the central desert that is called the Meseta, the idea was to get to the next destination by noon, maybe it was thirty five kilometers, when the air would begin to heat up so much that it would ripple before your eyes and you could feel as it burned you skin like the riled up air of a convection oven. So I would awaken at three AM and proceed with a flashlight and map out along the trail, perpetually looking for the yellow arrows that were painted on rocks or tree stumps or fence posts to mark the way. (I still see these arrows in dreams sometimes.) Anyhow, as I walked out of the darkness and into the new day there was always a feeling that lurked in the dim light of dawn, a sense of potential of course, but also a sense of the temporary and the infinite. I think that part of this feeling is that there is a timelessness to sunrises and sunsets. A beauty we can easily recognize and appreciate. We call this beauty timeless. But, in fact, we realize on some subtle level, that in it's timelessness lies the promise that it will go on being just as beautiful long after we have fallen from life and gone back to the earth. The sunset is beautiful for many reasons that we can name, but the reason that it's beauty could be called transcendant is that we cannot really put our fingers on why we feel the way that we do when we watch it happening, just as you could never put a real face to the name of "god". Another of the qualities of sunrise and sunset is that they are an obvious mile marker in the changing of the day. The time is always passing, the day is constantly changing but we really are able to visualize this change when the sun is setting or rising. In the dark of night we need to look at a clock to know how far in we are and in the day we can make a guess at time based on the position of the sun, but this is a guess at best. When the sun is coming and going, we can sit and observe the change happening. For me this concept is similar to that which is found in the sound of wheels whining on some black paved highway in the distance. The roaring of an engine and the blast of exhaust smoke are all symbolic of a change. Of a progression that is constantly happening whether we are aware of it or not. Whether we are ok with it or not. It is tapping into the vien of something that is always happening, just not always observed happening. When I was younger and living back in my hometown I would often walk in the middle of the night in the direction of that sound of the wheels of faraway 18 wheelers screaming on the I-90 highway as it ran past our town. I would walk in that direction and it would eventually deposit me at the railroad track that passed through the north side of town, not far from the highway. There I would would wait to hear the whistle blow far away to the west as the late night train made its way into the neighboring town. Then I could here the rumble and feel the vibrating tracks, and soon it would be thundering by me, wind blowing hard, cars whizzing by, and then it would be gone and as the air again grew still, the rumble would dissipate and then all there was to hear was the receding whistle, diminishing in volume, evaporating into the distance. Just as those trucks on the freeway, I realized that these trains made me feel the way they did because they were time passing. Just in a way that was different enough to be a metaphor that I could see clearly. This was change happening, time going by. This was life being finite, this was the realization of mortality. So then you take this vehicle on the road, this train whistle fading and put it in a scene with the sun slowly rising, the foggy brain, the tired eyes, the hunger of a morning stomach, the receding desire to still be in some warm bed...and you end up with something kind of intense. This is what I thought about briefly this morning as I looked out the window. Then I closed the blinds and went back to sleep. Something I was going to mention quickly turned into a metaphysical ramble. But who am I going to tell this to down here but all of you? Ha Ha! The idea of trying to figure out how to express this in spanish makes me laugh!! Ha ha! I suppose that these are the things that I sometimes find in my cerebro...hasta luego.

A New Home, A Dancing Professor, And Beef The Size Of A Man Hole Cover

In honor of the fourth addition to this blog series I am going to make a heroic attempt at not once mentioining anything political. Ha ha!! It will be a real feat, but I do think that it is do-able! Also, be forewarned, the apostrophy key on this computer doesn t work, see. That said, I will begin this episode with a brief reference to fate...In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera introduces upon his characters the philosophic concept of fortuity. The playing out of this concept goes on and on in the book, but at the moment, the relevance is this: At times ribbons of this fortuity float down on us like feathers, or light, slow moving snow flakes. We may or may not notice this happening, (I would wager that most people are in the dark as to what is happening on the fortuity plane) nevertheless we can probably all remember times when things just seemed to be lining up the right way. It is also likely that we can all remember times when the Commander Of Fortune took a big shit in his hand and wiped it all over our brand new white t-shirts and we then spent the next day or so trying to wash it out. This is a crude implied comparison, but hopefully clear all the same. Much to my glee I have had almost nothing but the good kind of fortuity thus far in my stay here in Argentina. Walking the streets it seems as if I could actually reach up to grab a handful of it, such has been my luck. Since the last blog I moved into my new home with a new set of Spanish speaking parents. (Or "padres" as they are called here. I thought, "Oh wow, is my host family a couple of gay guys?" No. It turned out that the word for parents here is padres, which seems like it would mean "dads". But it doesn t. Whatever.) They are named Alba and Miguel de Altube and they are both totally frickin rad!! She is very latina with a sing-song italian-spanish accent and a flare for talking with her hands. She has a lot of energy and talks a lot with me which is great for my comprehension. Miguel, too, has a ton of energy for conversation and he at times displays comedic flair from the realm of Mr Bean. He does these impressions of people and things that get me laughing hard. His eyes get really big and he does these crazy voices. He is well read and has a good sense of philosophy and history. What does he think about Argentinian politics? (Ha ha, trick question, I am not doing politics this time!!) But they are both great, bottom line. I have a lot of homework from my school and with these two I end up way beyond understanding the different subjects. They are like extra teachers that turn up where I sleep. Oh wow. The only thing that I need to get used to is that they live on the third floor of a building that faces this giant block-wide street called Avenida de Carlos Pellegrini, and it positively roars at all hours. (Would I expect less from a city with more than ELEVEN MILLION inhabitants?) Not kidding about the word roar. I wake up sweating and I am positive that the world is in the final stages of ending. I have taken to wearing earplugs and now, ironically, I can still hear the street but I am sleeping through the alarm. Mierda! But all is good, no worries. My school is really cool too. It is bigger than I thought it would be, there are many classrooms and shiteloads of people from Switzerland study there. The classes are five students to a teacher. My teacher is named Guillermo, pronounced Gee-djermo. He is from Havana de Cuba and you can tell immediatly that the dude is a dancer/musician. He is constantly moving, almost dancing as he teaches. He may be the most captivating teacher that I have ever had. He is constatnly cracking jokes and drawing grand pictures all over the whiteboard and then interacting with them and then erasing them and drawing more. Then he goes into ultra-serious mode and dials in the point of discussion. After class one day I played him some Sergento Garcia on my iPod and he started dancing just like I thought he would. Turns out he is a conga player. Perfect!! I can say with confidencia that I have learned more in the last three days than I have in the past year, in the realm of spanish. All this stuff is happening in a neighborhood called Recoleta. This locale is in stark contrast to the place I was staying before. Large wide streets, stores with gold watches, fat white men with light blue sweaters draped over thier shoulders, and green green grass at every turn. The apartments have grand facades and the architecture is very european. Churches and edificios all seem as if they were carved from stone. At first I panicked, and then I realized that even here they have cortados and empanadas. So now my ritual is getting these things and maybe a sandwich on the way to class at about one, stopping to eat them in one of the greenest, most beautiful parks ever, and then cruising up through the chic-ness to my school. At night Miguel makes dinner and he gives himself no credit but he serves up some magic for sure. Tonight he made a pasta dish, last night it was Argentinian beef with tortilla española, and sunday he did whole roasted chicken in this local chile rub with roasted potatoes. Rad. The final, non political part of this chapter will be a brief description of one of the funnest nights I have had in years. After my class on monday night I met up with Miranda and Erin from San Francisco, some of you may know them. Miranda is one of my best homies from the SF era. They have been travelling in Peru and then more recently here in AR. So we met up at a bar on Carlos Pelligrini and drank beer from these liter glasses that looked like something out of a laborotory. We were joined by another gringo who lives here and from the bar we cabbed up to a cool little neighborhood called Palermo. We arrived at a restaurant that was rumored to be muy bien and there was quite a wait but being the cool cats that we were the head waiter said that if we hung around he would make it worth our while. I am coming to relish these moments, despite my inherent skepticism about such offers. He continued to keep us topped off with champagne and we were barraged by tray after tray of sausage and olives stuffed with almonds and parmesan cheese. An hour later we were way drunker and way hungrier and finally being seated. The onslaught that followed will go down in Matteo Del Norte dining legend. No joke. We ordered two steak dishes, (if anyone reading this isn t aware, Argentina is prized, the world over, for its beef.) and one plate of roasted potatoes. What we got was one giant skewer with probably two pounds of tenderloin on it, a giant steak -freaking hugely giant- that had been butterflied but still had about two inches of thickness on each side. It literally looked like a giant peice of wood and it was cooked perfectly. The potatoes ended up being a giant ceramic dish-full that we maybe ate half of, and then they served us no less than fifteen side dishes full of things like roasted garlic, olive tapenade, peas in mustard sauce, pureed squash, and many other crazy things. It was fantastic. I ordered a bottle of Atilio Malbec for the table that was "expensive" by argentine standards but incredibly well priced by ours. (Watch me skip the shitty, unfair international trade deficit comment!) It was perfect with the meal and incredibly nuanced on its own...it was pretty close to food nirvana actually. Then, as is true of most nirvana-like states, it slowly faded away leaving its existence as but a memory. And goddamn were we full. But, this was the ladies last night in town so we were out to paint it red and what with all the champagne and beer and Malbec, drinking a lot more seemed like the right thing to do at that moment...so we went to another bar. In my rational mind, which was riding in the backseat at this point, I was thinking "school night". But in my drinking mind, which was in full control of the vehicle, (bad drunk driving metaphor, I realize this) I was ready to go. We ended up befriending a cab driver who, to the best of my recollection, gave us a great deal on the ride home. I ended up home at two something in the madrugada and Miguel, who stays up really late cause he can t sleep due to his bad liver and the cacophony outside the window, was chillin watching tv. He wanted to hear all about the gran noche and all I remember was feeling like I could speak spanish completely fluently in that moment. I probably made no sense at all. The next day was as rough as my rational mind imagined that it might be. But it was all good. Such is the price of glory in certain instances. And that is my story for tonight. I was telling Cuppies in an email yesterday, that this whole going-to-learn-langauge-in-Argentina-idea is the best thing I have done in many many moons. If anyone out there is entertaining the idea of living in another country for while, do it as soon as you can!!! It is such an amazing experience...all ups and downs considered. I wouldn t exchange these experiences for anything en el mundo...buenas noches mi gente...

Art Fairs, Breakdancing and The Abduction of Modernity

Today began by exiting my hospedaje into the middle of a lively art fair! This is a regular sunday thing in San Telmo and it is something that people from all over the place scramble to be a part of. Colorful and varied, it´s myriad objets d árte do nothing to take away from that feeling so uniquely belonging to sundays. The air seems lighter and the murmur of the crowd implies a lack of stress and maybe a hint of hangover. The first thing that caught my attention today was a pair of nylon string guitarists playing the old classics of Handel and Bach in tandem. Thier fingers flew and thier eyes held the intensity of bullfighters. One man wore a black beret that matched his beard and the other looked to be a little bit of a gypsy. They played with furrowed brows and concentrated movements and it seemed as though to them, all the people present weren´t close to them at all. I strolled from there down Defensa through a series of mimes doing this and that. A pair of vaudeville types with suitcases standing up on a crate, a silver haired "modern man", and most strange amongst them, a woman of at least seventy years of age, posing as a woman of ill repute from our own prohibition era. I had my daily cortado and miga tostada and proceeded on through the fair. The things they sell here make a backpacker like me wish he had a bigger backpack. I will not be buying any of these things now, it still being the beginning of the trip and all, but if I were to, I could decorate a house the size of a museum with these things. There is some random shit here for sure, and I guess that is what makes a lot of it so cool. There seems to be some sort of fascination with grammaphones...don´t ask, I don´t know, but they are groovy. On the subject of music...it seems as though whereever you go in the world, shitty american music has beaten you there. When I was living in france, I remember the first question I got in the kitchen where I was working...(in a thick french accent)"What does, ´Oops I Did It Again´ mean?" I said, "Ummm..." So that was then. You go to Africa and it is the same old bubblegum crap, (and some good Dre and Tupac, they like West Coast) Australia it is whatever pop machina animé that is happening, just a few months later. So in Argentina, it is hardly a surprise to hear American tracks playing. What is surprising in the selection. Usually it is current pop shite, here it is out of date pop shite!!! Now I know that the 80´s are suddenly cool again...(a mystery that the music was every popular even the first time! Sorry Cuppies. You can correct me later.) you hear that shit more and more in the US too...but here it is NOTHING BUT the 80s!!! I am hearing Linda Ronstadt and Madonna all day long! All sorts of other shite that I have fought for over a decade and a half to forget is all rushing back out of the crappy little speakers of seemingly every radio in the land! The irony of this flushing of shite american music into every system in the world is that in almost every locality in which this is happening, the local music is hundreds of times better. Africa; why would you listen to the teenie bopper of the minute from a place like the USA when you had Paul Hanmer and Hugh Masakela and Ladysmith Black Mambazo??? New Zealand; Trinity Roots, Salmonella Dub, anything Maori?!? Argentina...? Forget about it. The music culture of this continent is off the charts. And yet, we have music from people who should have been shot, or at least flogged, the first time they subjected us to thier racket twenty years ago. (I know a lot of people living now were too young at the time to be forever scarred by the music back then, but don´t make us do this bullshit again! Please!) Yesterday I went to a concert they were having in my favorite park in San Telmo, Lezama. The band was set up on the basketball court and they were rockin it. They were doing four part harmonies and jamming on all these latino rythmes. It was rad. In the intermission they had a breakdancing competition that was equally impressive. These little dudes, they must have been about 16, rocking out in thier urban wear and bandanas. That was actually the first decent American music I´ve heard yet...big hip hop beats blasted over a huge sound system, you could hear it a long ways off. The energy in the youth here is also impressive. Nothing like watching a huge field of a couple thousand teenagers bouncing in unison while watching two dudes face-off in a breakdancing battle. I was kinda hoping they would take a page out of the Zoolander book and start actually breakdance fighting! But they didn´t. So anyway, bottom line, the mix here is heavy with American tunes, just like everywhere else. That is just gotta piss off the local musicians. I guess that is the point of this rant. I was recently told about an essay on the subject of the West´s unfair monopoly on modernity. The export of our culture, our fashion, our pop values, etc. Because we wield so much money and technology and trade power, all the nooks and crannies of the developing world are filled with the hubris of western modernity and all present are told how to go about creating it for themselves, whether they want it or not. Capitalism, christianity, cigarettes and all manner of pop culture glitz. So I guess that this is just another face of that. Our music on everyone else´s stereos. Then again, Madonna did play Evita, and Evita is still a major sensation here long after her death. Maybe old Madonna does have some royalty claim down here. I dunno. I am gonna get going now...I am moving in with a family this afternoon, where I will spend a couple weeks living while going to language school in Recoleta. I may be a tad bit old to be getting a new set of parents, but we soon shall see what comedy dawns from this newest cauldron of cultural stew...there is never a dull moment.

Cortados, Dog Walkers and Time To Think

I have been spending a lot of time in cafes in these days since arriving in Buenos Aires. When you spend a lot of time in a cafe you do a number of things that are all good things. First, you drink coffee. Whether or not you like coffee or think it is good for you, the ritual of coffee is a good one. The smell of coffee, the smells of coffeehouses, the chill of the outside contrasted by the burn of that first sip of coffee or tea, the sounds of quiet conversation or pages turning or keys being tapped. Then there is the waiting. Coffee is a game of patience. Waiting for coffee to cool off to that perfect temperature is one of the great pleasures of my life. I like it because I really dig that perfect temperature, but I also like that it takes time. You have time to reflect, time to think about things or to think about nothing. Our America is so busy and full of action, it is an almost therapeutic few minutes. Minutes that could be introspective, or could be filled with substantive discourse with another human being. So this is the second good thing that you do in a cafe, you take time and reflect. You watch people, you read something, you write something, you relax. (Yeah, I know, coffee doesn´t really make you relax.) While partaking of a cafe, as a result of the free time you suddenly have, you may realize that you are able to observe the world in a different capacity, and while you are doing this, you may realize that you are noticing different things than you do in your everyday bustle. Here it is things like...the famous dog walkers of Buenos Aires! These are people who take to the narrow streets with anywhere between eight and fifteen dogs, all on relatively short leashes, and proceed to negociate sidewalks and crosswalks with all manner of passersby. It is a bit like having a bunch of helium balloons on short strings bobbing about, except upside-down. This morning I watched a guy with about thirteen dogs walking right down the middle of Avenida Defensa. He had a line of cars and busses stretched out a block behind him, and not one of them was honking. They just let him do what he had to do and then went about thier day. In the same cafe, I watched friends greeting each other with kisses. Not exactly like ´les bises´ in France where they kiss each other´s cheeks back and forth. But just one solid kiss on each others cheek. This is not just a man-woman thing. The guys kiss each other too. (Look out Todd, you little homophobe you...) The reason for this has been explained to me to be the result of the importance that is placed on friendship here. Being, on the whole, a relatively poor place, it is a thing that has much more value than money could have and in the sense of ´parea´, time spent with friends is the most important time that could be spent in a day or week or year. I also noticed the way that the young help the old. This isn´t the best example because the waitress/proprietress of the cafe that I frequent is no spring chicken. At probably seventy five years of age she moves like cooling lava and has a voice as gravelly as already cold lava. This morning a much older woman with apparently no voice at all creaked in the door and the proprietress went straight to her to assist her to a table. It was a moving thing to watch them make the slow journey across the salle to a little single table next to the wall. (I really like aged people and I would have helped too but I knew I would probably only hurt one or both of these ladies.) La vieja sat the other one down and I figured that they were probably old acquaintences but as I eavesdropped on the exchange that followed, I realized that they had in fact just met. This, to me, seemed interesting and heartening, I was glad for it. The last thing I will meander on about today is the cumulative phenomenon that I am experiencing in these periods of time...these periods of cafe time where I can actually take the time to get my mind around a lot of the ideas that I have had over the past while, but never had time to really get into. It is truly a good thing to have the time to process things in one´s life. I have talked a lot to many people in the recent past about the things that frustrate them in thier American lives. Stress and pressure, too much to do, not enough money, the list goes on. Most of the American psyche functions at high speed with a focus on having options (freedom) and then fitting as much into a day or hour or minute as possible. (´Time is money.´ I have been thinking lately how silly it is that we use the word spend when we talk about passing time. You spend your time as you spend your money, the major parallel being that obstensibly there is never quite enough of it.) Time management. We think about being efficient, using our time wisely. Even the most simple-minded of us is, these days, a multi-tasker. So it seems, in the beginning, that taking time and ´spending´ it doing nothing but sitting, maybe thinking, maybe reflecting, maybe just being empty for a few minutes, is a waste of time. I have never thought this way, but I, as you all know well, get just as busy and caught up in the American life as the next guy or gal. I think about it all now, with so much free time afforded to me, and I realize that the best thing we can do for our individual ´trips´, is to take time out in whatever way we can...just to maintain our sanity. Sitting down to eat with people, actually chewing the food before gulping it down, actually cooking your own dinner of real grown-in-the-ground ingredients, sitting in a park, sitting on your porch, zoning out playing an instrument, actually listening closely to the things that your friends are saying, walking somewhere, listening to music, waiting for coffee to cool...there are many opportunities to meditate. But yet we skip them in order to get just a little more done. I always promise myself that when I get back to the US from some other place where the poeple are more relaxed (and much healthier), I will take it easier than last time. Do less running around, do less working, less multi-tasking. But do I ever? No. Or I do, but for only about as long as it takes for Bamfer to balance his checkbook. (Not long.) So I guess that is why, as I get older, as I have more perspective on the experiences that I have, I realize how much this all really means......And those are a couple of the things that I like about spending time in a cafe! Long version of a short story no?!? Ha ha! But if you took the time to read this then I know you are my friend and I look forward to the next time we can sit down and have coffee together. Or Chai, I know how many of you non-coffee people are into the chai. It doesn´t really matter what the drink is, I guess we just need to chill the fuck out in general...watch the dog walkers and cheek kissers, and give the employees of our brains a cigarette break. (Cigarettes are bad.) Until next time, I bid this place adieu.

Burritos At 37,000 Feet

So this will serve as my first South American blog-writing endeavor...and it would seem appropriate to start with a new level of enjoyment of a foodstuff that indeed comes from the latin american world, the exalted burrito. I have eaten burritos a lot of times and in a lot of places. Places where you wouldn´t expect to find a burrito. Places like South Africa, Thailand, New Zealand and France. Also I have eaten burritos in some of the burrito meccas of our fine continent, namely, the taco trucks of the west coast and the wonderful taquerias of the Mission district in San Francisco, and of course in Mexico. The best burrito I have ever had comes from a place on Haight Street at Fillmore called Cuco´s, the worst burrito I ever had was probably the one I had in Thailand. (They overcompensate with thier own cuisine, no doubt about it. I wasn´t bitching...) So all of this burrito-rambling is leading to the place where I had never had the pleasure of eating a burrito...on a plane flying to Mexico City!! This was no shabby burrito either. Yes, okay, it was not algo especial de El Buen Sabor o Pancho Villa, but it was a mexican burrito at high altitude!!! Beans and cheese and shredded pollo rojo...mmm. This is cool and even while I am overblowing this point...it made me a happy camper nevertheless. But I´ll move on.
I landed in Buenos Aires 24 hours after leaving the warmth of my short term futon home in Ty´s livingroom in Portland. I was expecting the airport to be mayhem-ish but it ended up being pretty calm and predictable and I caught a very easy-like-sunday-morning shuttle into El Retiro where I proceeded to find my home for the time being in San Telmo. For those of you who have been here before you have your own impressions but mine are based on experiences I had in Europe and Asia mostly. A lot of diesel engines and exhaust and an air-pollution problem that doesn´t bother me as much as take me back to those places through my nose memory. The streets are narrow and there is a sense of bustle here that I have never seen in any North American city. I sat in a cafe this morning watching people walk thier dogs and go to and from work and talk and traverse here and there. It is a pleasant cacophony that never questions itself. This is a nice ambiance in my experience. It doesn´t disturb me or make me want to leave or escape it with earplugs or an iPod. These are the great places in our world to watch things happen...to watch existence go down. All of the time I have spent on streets watching people go by...patterns form. North America has a sort of inborn embarrassment that most people probably don´t realize that they are projecting. Europe has its history and you can see the confidence that comes from culturally fortified idea imprinting. Asia has its population constraints and related machinations and one gets the feeling that there is much more going on than one can see with ones eyes. Africa is often lucky to have pavement at all and there is a beauty and desperation in the eyes of those who pass by. Buenos Aires has color and character and a lot of beautiful people. What am I getting at with all this? What am I saying exactly? That being from the "most powerful country in the world", it is a nice thing to find a more honest feeling in the streets of a country that we could feasibly destroy without even beginning to put a dent into our arsenal or weapons budget. That, while I love the country I was born in for certain reasons, I am happy to find qualities that feel like home in places that we learn nothing about as children of the empire. There is a good feeling amongst the chaos of these streets on these other continents that I would classify as this, among other and more simple things: These people are not warmongers...these are people who are the same as we are in so many ways...the same as we all are. They are into futbol and family and drinking some beer. They like to smooch thier sweethearts and get into mischief and hope for some things and mourn for other things. It is not as though we don´t all do these things, but in these places it feels as though we are not so ego-focused. We are not so wrapped up in the idea of being the center of the world, the most important thing in the world, with all the things we want orbiting us and us alone. So now you´ll all think I am a socialist!!! Ha ha! I say "Eff You" to all the -ists and -isms, and I give a high five to humanity being humanity... Ah, but this first blog has gone from burritos to politics way too quickly. I´ll try to just talk about the things that I do from now on, with no thinking involved...ha ha, just kidding!!! Good times, good times. The truth of that matter is that I am just happy to be here...on the road again. Eating empanadas and toasted sandwiches with jamon y queso and drinking 2 dollar bottles of good wine with beef raviolis in garlic sauce. I will probably come back fat, drunk and sped off my ass from 50 cent cortado coffee drinks!
So that is it for today. I´m going to the park to chill. I hope you are all doing well my friends. Matteo

-PS, on the plane eating burritos with me were the Dandy Warhols. A semi famous rock band from Portland. They were gonna play a show in Mexico City...a rock show fueled by the mighty high-altitude burrito!!!