Alebonski

letssharestories: …

Wed, 23 May 2012 08:26:51 -0400

…

Ana (new fiction)

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:29:35 -0400

by Alebonski

Ana rolls cigarettes like some people roll joints: skinny, cylindrical with the ends knotted so that they look like torpedoes. She rolls them deftly with elegant fingers, long slender things that could be those of a pianist.

He watches her intently. It is too beautiful not to watch. His own cigarettes, he thinks, look more professional, but her’s are prettier, daintier, more elegant. He watches her hands dancing up and down the wrapper, distributing a pinch of tobacco. It is a subtle poetry of motion. She then rolls them tightly twixt her thumb and her forefinger and brings the paper to her lips, her little tongue dancing down the sticky part.

She ties the ends, and sticks the fag between her lips. Her eyes on him, she feels round the table for a light and finds an open book of cheap matches. She strikes one and sets the cigarette alight. She takes the first draw into her mouth but exhales the heady mix of paper, raw tobacco and sulphur in a dense cloud of smoke. She pulls again, the glowing ember at the tip glowing brighter. She inhales this draught deeply, her rib cage rising as her lungs expand. She tilts her head back on the overstuffed pillow of the couch and closes her eyes. This is brief ecstasy. She exhales the pale smoke skyward.

She leans forward, opens her eyes, smiles at him, and tosses the matches across the table. Her movements are slow, graceful. He wants to say cat-like but that does not describe the fluidity. She folds her legs under her and leans back against the couch again, taking another draw.

“So, why are you here?” she says, the words embodied physically in the smoke to an extent that they could reach out and touch him.

He lights his own cigarette, performing the same ritual of shallow inhaling and exhaling of the ignition fumes, and then taking the first good draw. He does it quickly and answers her question with the exhalation.

“You invited me.”

“Yes, but why did you come?”

This is existentialist garbage. It is a prelude to nothing. It is too late and he is too tired.

“I wanted to get to know you.”

“Why? Are you attracted to me?”

“Are you asking if I think you’re beautiful?”

“Do you?”

“Yes. Very.”

“Do you want to make love to me?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” he exhales again.

Not so long ago… well, perhaps a decade since, he would not have hesitated. He would have said “Yes,” in a manner that was confident and absolute and seen how the dominoes fell. Now, he is more concerned she might say “Come here,” and let him kiss her, the acrid taste of nicotine rolling around their tongues as they intertwine. It is not that he does not desire her. He can not confess how many times (would it be hundreds?) he has imagined what he will find when he pulls down her slacks, the belt line of which rides so tightly to her hips that it seems to hover mere centimeters above her pubis.

She is exotic. Her think black hair falling in gentle morning waves around her face, framing soft but well-defined features wrapped in ashen colored skin and eyes that glow like onyx. When he first met her over a year ago, he thought she was Latin. She is, but not in the way Americans usually think. She’s Romani, a gypsy, though this is now considered a racial slur.

The talisman she wears around her neck is one of a tree. She leaned over one night and showed it to him.

“Yggdrasil,” he said. He wondered if the Old Norse translated for her.

Yggdrasil is dying. Greedy men are squandering the abundance of her canopy, undermining her roots with their ceaseless digging for the rocks they value, hacking at her truck with axes, burning her branches, filling her leaves with toxic smoke. Yggdrasil. What will become of the World?

He used to believe that somehow, the right woman, the right love, would save him. She did not come. At this point he has two choices: Either recognize that he is beyond salvation or seek salvation in himself… and in the World.

The World is full, but it does not speak. Laying down in a meadow on the mountainside, he can hear it, the warmth of the Sun beating down on him, the caress of the breeze. The World’s speech is in the wind rustling in the trees, the sound of the birds careening through the air.

We are so lonely, but we are not alone.

Mine Frangipani St. Croix, VI 2012 Minolta X700, Kodak 400

Sun, 13 May 2012 06:58:08 -0400

Mine

Frangipani St. Croix, VI 2012

Minolta X700, Kodak 400

I keep thinking of Henry Miller in Colossus of Maroussi being told by the American Consulate in...

Sun, 13 May 2012 06:53:19 -0400

I keep thinking of Henry Miller in Colossus of Maroussi being told by the American Consulate in Greece that he had to go back to the States.

“I don’t want to go back to the States, I’m writing about Greece right now.”

I don’t want to go home. I am home.

Beach art, St. Croix, Virgin Islands Minolta x700, Ilford 400 by...

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 09:20:58 -0400

Beach art, St. Croix, Virgin Islands

Minolta x700, Ilford 400

by Alebonski

Beach art, St. Croix, Virgin Islands, March 2012 Minolta x700,...

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 09:19:27 -0400

Beach art, St. Croix, Virgin Islands, March 2012

Minolta x700, Ilford 400

by Alebonski

Excrement and the Exurban Male

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:44:00 -0400

The Texas A & M logo is a modern adaptation of 19th century aesthetics. Historically, it was proper to place the grandest factor of a set of initials as the largest and at center on a monogrammed shirt, or on a set of embroidered towels. Sadly for the institution, it means that Texas A&M is rendered ATM.

ATM is emblazoned on the rear end of my neighbor’s Land Rover. It is a Land Rover LR3, one of the new generation of Rovers that is supposed to harken back to the days of old while still being practical for the current needs of its customer base.

It used to be that a Land Rover meant serious travel. Land Rover’s were the preferred mode of travel in the former British Empire, at least the parts where the British hadn’t gotten around to building trains: The Sahara and most of sub-Saharan Africa come to mind, but there were also parts of Asia, the Americas and the Caribbean. Tough, rugged, indestructible, they were the dominant mode of transit before the Toyota Land Cruiser, a cheaper, more reliable and more parts-ready form of transport. When I think of the term “Land Rover” this is what comes to mind, something along the lines of the Crusader or the Defender series.

Today’s Land Rovers are not built for rough trade, as it were. It is a lifestyle brand, meant to evoke all the charms and rigors of the English country club. It is marketed to people who would prefer to do without all that nasty business of having to fix the thing yourself when there isn’t a mechanic for 100 miles. That is, after all, what the extended warranty is all about. The dealerships take great pride in the fact that all their mechanics were trained in the rigors of repairing Land Rovers by the firm itself and they charge a great deal for the privilege - to the tune of $1000.00 for an oil and filter change. Never mind the fact that, while in Kenya, my parents lead mechanic was a Kikuyu who did not have the benefit of a diagnostic computer, or that the most difficult journey the modern Land Rover will likely undertake is the journey from the gated community in the exurban subdivision to the Starbucks in the exurban shopping mall.

It has always astounded me how quickly adults revert to childhood descriptions of, and dramatic disgust at, basic bodily functions. The scent of a methane leak emanating from the anus of a childhood chum is the subject of much mirth through our school years. But this is just farting. A particularly loud or long or in other fashion glorious fart will lead to hilarious taunts of “Dude, you better check your shorts!” Woe be to him, or her, who actually does because, beyond farts, many seem to whither at the frightful sight of what is left over after this morning’s enjoyment of “huevos rancheros.”

I have many times found myself cleaning up the excrement of others to such an extent that I now consider it my primary job description. I’m contemplating emblazoning it on my calling cards “Alebonski: I clean up other peoples’ messes.”

An erstwhile macho, well, boy (he was so fresh out of puberty he can not possibly be called a man) comes to mind. He fancied himself quite popular with the ladies and seemed to have some success in that department. Someone was good enough to provide him with the means to ride in a BMW and he had the attitude that young women seem to find attractive - a disinterested cool which causes the feminine members of our species to swoon with thoughts of saving him. One evening he came rushing up to me to inform me that someone had vomited in the urinal.

“Well,” I said, “We’d best clean it up then.”

Within moments of our arrival on the scene, I was at it with rubber gloves, a sponge, a scrub brush and bleached hot water. It was disgusting and it did smell bad, but there was nothing untoward about it. My colleague, however, began retching almost the instant I set to work, so much so that I told him he better get on with it and find a mop and bucket.

Last I heard, he was an “investment advisor” at a local stock jobbing firm of dubious reputation. I am still cleaning up other people’s messes.

I was out with my parent’s poodle the other morning. My ATM neighbor was in town. It’s warm enough to fish now and he had their Land Rover suburban assault vehicle, burgundy and polished to glistening. He’d also brought the Jeep Wrangler in case there was any actual off-road travel that needed to be done.

We’ve been working with the poodle. She has issues. One of them is going to the bathroom in the house. I let her off her lead. At six in the morning, there’s hardly ever anyone about in our neighborhood and she would rather do prance about before going about her business. I call it the poodle shit dance of infinite joy. Sometimes, the dance occurs but no business gets done. This is just another example of how the poodle, formerly admired for its intelligence, is now the poster child for canine prozac.

The poodle skipped up the lawn between the town homes, and down the other side toward the creek. I dutifully followed along, bread bag in hand, to pick up what finally came out. She found the ideal spot and was going about her business when suddenly, my neighbor emerged on his back porch in his undershirt and boxers, both of which looked as though they’d been pressed.

“Good morning,” I called, startling him.

“Is that your dog?” he drawled.

“No. We’re dog sitting,” I replied, holding up the bread bag.

“Oh.” There had been recriminations planned. The miscreant giant off-leash poodle was to be the subject of emergency meetings of the Homeowners’ Association with stern letters written and threats of possible fines.

But I was there, ready to do my duty with the poodle’s doody. And anyway, his attention was now elsewhere. He had realized that the poodle was doing a “number 2.”

“Ugh,” he said, with a look of disgust that would rival a three year old’s, “It’s pooh!”

I wanted to correct him, “Actually, no. It’s ‘pooh-ING,’” but he was gone too quickly. I still wonder if he went into the bathroom to produce some excrement of his own, or if he managed to thwart the desire, crawl back in bed, and simply have the vision of the “pooh” exiting the poodle haunt his morning dreams.

Et tu, Tumblr?

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 08:42:34 -0400

Shiny new look. Shiny new privacy policy. Is Tumblr, too, now going to sell us things?

Plastics make it possible. The entirety of America is made out of plastic: The buildings, the cars,...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 08:02:00 -0400

Plastics make it possible. The entirety of America is made out of plastic: The buildings, the cars, the food, the people. My high school English teacher once said that Disneyland is superfluous: All of America is Disneyland. With the Golden Arches, Big Boy, drive-in movies, and attractions like the world’s largest ball of twine, and towers in various states where you can pay to go up and see various other states (all dull) it did not take an enormous stretch of the imagination for Uncle Walt to put it all together in one place… or for someone to put an Alpine village in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.

Trees are out and concrete’s in here, where our formerly quaint Alpine village is being replaced with megalomanic monstrosities of questionable construction - 2X4’s and plywood on the inside, river rock glued to the outside - and where they are heating all the streets with natural gas in order that the suburbanites can wear their high heels in January. The arboricide is extensive: formerly, the City insisted that all trees cut down had to be replaced with other trees. Now the City is cutting down trees in order to replace them with rock planters that will not have trees, but bronze sculptures depicting the former inhabitants of our valley, deer, elk, bear, Indians (the Utes were here, but the favored subjects seem to be Plains Indians), and low to the ground plantings that will not disturb the “views” of the gallery fronts. The five fifty-foot spruce trees in the immediate vicinity of our store have been replaced with scrawny 6 foot aspen trees and dwarf evergreens that will remain a “good height,” according to our neighbor, for a long time. A good height being anything that doesn’t block the view of her gallery or her bronzes on the street and anything she can see over. Since our neighbor is about 5 foot 1, this means the majority of the megaflora on our street will have to be about 3 feet.

People are impressed with what they are calling “the grand boulevard” feel of our street. Why one would need a grand boulevard in an alpine village is a recurring question in our minds, but our street is now wide enough for storm troopers to march down. That gives the Republicans here a hard on, or at least inspiration to refill their perscriptions for Viagra.

The narrow bit at the start of our street is to allow buses but discourage other traffic, but is still wide enough to fit an M1-Abrams tank. The buses need it this wide – despite being able to afford to heat the streets, our town can not afford to hire drivers with the most rudimentary skills. Every year, the guy who runs the bus department goes to Australia to hire drivers. Australia, wide open spaces, straight roads, not a lot of traffic, not a lot of people. What we need is some New York City Transit bus drivers, guys who can actually drive, who announce every stop as if they’re saying “Kiss my ass!” and who don’t need to swing all the way into the oncoming lane to make a right hand turn. The bus drivers are always whinging that they feel threatened at night when the bars empty out and the buses fill up with drunks. Can’t imagine some smart-assed drunken snowboarder would pose much threat to a 250 pound black man who got his commercial drivers license while in juvie.

That the SS could march through is appropriate: Dick Cheney’s in town, the old bastard, ambulance standing by to whisk him back to Washington should his pace-maker go on the fritz again. He’s here to meet with with the Koch Brothers and a bunch of other old bastards up in Beaver Creek. Our idea of turning that place into a minimum security prison gains more momentum every day.

Whitelandia

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 07:48:00 -0400

Greetings from Republican Whitelandia! Yes, there is a white homeland. It is my hometown, where the only thing whiter than the people is the snow. There are, naturally, some darker people here, mostly brown ones from across the river and over the fence. These are here to do the jobs that the good white folks don’t want to get their hands dirty with (most of them).

It is a wonderful thing that America has assumed the role of leader of the Western World. Whereas before the European colonial powers offered the lame ass excuse of “spreading enlightenment to the darker corners of the Earth” for their behavior, America offers full employment, at extremely low wages and in piss poor conditions, naturally, but as one acquaintance of mine likes to point out, it’s better than being a whore.

We should go to church every Sunday and offer our thanks to Mamon that there are so many brown people around the world who would rather make crap for us than be prostitutes, especially the Asians because they’re really good at making stuff we need the most like iPhones and Nintendos.

Americans, in the meantime, have become the most useless race on the planet. In two generations, we have gone from a self-reliant, can-do mentality to a nation of sheep governed by liars who graze the aisles of Wal Mart, Costco, Supermarkets and the myriad other outlets looking for the best price on cheap plastic crap we don’t need. A brief short in the supply chain results in absolute panic, not because there isn’t any bread available, but because the preferred brand is out of stock. Come Peak Oil, the good people of Whitelandia will eat each other because no one knows how to bake anymore or how to grow things or how to communicate anything other than orders to waiters and dis-satisfaction to same.

All of us who are not in the moneyed classes are waiters now, here to fulfill every wish and fantasy of the spoiled rotten or to be castigated for failure. “What do you mean I can’t have Domaine Romanee Conti 2002 for $200?” Apparently, “a., because I don’t have any; b. because there’s none available in Colorado and c. because that which is available elsewhere in the country is selling for somewhere in the region of $2500 a pop”  is not a valid reason.  ”You’re not going to be able to get away with this much longer,” one old bastard said to a coworker of mine. “Get away with what, sir?” my coworker replied most innocently. “Not having any wines I know and charging what you charge for them. You’re gonnna have competition up the street.” “But sir, I already have competition. There are six other licenses in town, thirteen in the upper valley, and numerous stores an hour and a half down the road. So I don’t think I’m getting away with anything, nor am I trying to.”  Vintage 2003 Kendall Jackson? Sorry, 2006 is the current vintage. “That’s ridiculous. I want the 2003!” “That tap has been shut off.”  Nothing is ever out of season in Whitelandia, though the tomatoes in January are “disappointing.” “Very well, sir. Right you are. So sorry about that. (Insert genuflection here in order to underscore the sincerity of the insincere apology). We’ll have a word with our suppliers straight away and see if we can get some better tomatoes for your next visit next year.”

A recent study of Beaver Creek, Colorado, second or third home of the Koch Brothers, shows that the average price of a dwelling has topped $3.2 million and that the average occupancy is 18 days per year.

The Fourth of July has come and gone.  Long thought of by previous generations lesser Americans quaintly as “Independence Day,” the Whitelandians have a better understanding that July 4 is a time to be together with one’s loved ones to celebrate the glory of the internal combustion engine, to take in the best sales of the summer, and to gorge on enormous quantities of chemically fed and genetically modified propane scorched red meat.  Kicked off by the obligatory fly over by the Imperial Air Force (Whitelandians are very proud of their military – it keeps the brown people in line when they decide they want more than Americans are willing to share) the parade here was led by the local Harley Owners Group.  It was followed by a long line of large trucks advertising for the only economy that we have here, development, and marching bands.  The smallest car was a Smart Car advertising a real estate company.  It boasted a sign saying “Think Big.” After the parade was over, point made, the owner fed it to his Hummer.

The local paper had a special on why America is still number one: It is because people can play dress up. Only in America do you have the freedom to reinvent yourself, the logic went. I’d like to know what all those transexuals in Brazil are thinking. The local HOG group are a good example of reinvention.  The Harley Davidson, long a sign of rebelliousness, now costs in the region of $40,000. Since there is little practical point to owning one in places where it snows, it is assumed that you must own an equally iconoclastic $40,000 automobile to get around when you’re not riding in the July 4th parade.  As millionaires apparently like playing dress up, but most of them have already been to rehab, we’re thinking of turning our store into a combination convenience store and fetish shop: Milk, Oreos, dildos and vinyl boustiers. If we get a license to carry guns and put in a couple of gas pumps, we can call it Johnny’s All American. Our environmental conscience getting in the way (as usual) we’re investigating the availability of reusable condoms.  If no such animal is available, perhaps we can make our fortunes by having them manufactured in the Far East. Would you like to invest? You could buy a Harley when we go public! And vinyl pants.

Here in Whitelandia, thinking about “Independence” Day and Bastille Day, patriotic thoughts abound:  Is a  two party system 50 percent better or twice as bad as a one party system? And sorry, Ron Paul, the Libertarians will never be a force in American politics. Americans don’t want more liberty and less government. This would mean they would have only themselves to blame when something goes wrong, quite contrary to the blameless society that has been created by whinging liberals and their alleged counterparts, the Republicans, who blame everything on fags, unwed mothers, people who don’t go to church (“I like your Christ. I dislike your Christians, they are so unlike your Christ.” – Ghandi), fags, liberals, the media, fags and now terrorists, who are in league with the fags in that they all worship Satan.

What Americans really want is more government and less liberty: Thus the Patriot Act (the greatest abridgment of Constitutional rights since either Lincoln suspended habeus corpus during the Civil War or McArthy put together HUA or Roosevelt interred all Japanese-Americans - bloody minorities, they really do all look alike); thus the creation of the Homeland Security department (the largest peace time increase in the size of the government EVER); thus the ever-increasing popularity of covenant controlled gated “communities” in unincorporated areas of large Western counties.

The good people of our county recently voted, again, to continue not having a charter separate from that of the State, and continue with a three member board rather than increase the representatives to five. The idea of more representation was deliberately confused, by the vote’s detractors, with the idea of more government and people bought it.

Freedom in Whitelandia has nothing to do with politics. Freedom is that if I have enough money to be able to afford a Humvee (and the gas to put in it), I have a right to have one, regardless of what it’s doing to “someone in Florida,” according to a conversation overheard the other day.

Miami

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 08:29:00 -0500

At the Dallas airport, they try to sell me Texas BBQ, a Dallas Cowboys jersey and a Chinese-made Brooks Brothers shirt.

In Miami, I get off the plane to view a gorgeous young woman, her bare feet elevated on her roll-aboard suitcase, her long, shapely bronze legs running up to her white shorts, her mid-length sleeved t-shirt clinging to her shapely young body. Lost in the virtual world rendered by her MacBook, she is unaware of my long, longing glance at her and also of the man in the white suit and panama hat with the bushy salt and pepper mustache sitting next to her. He sees me. He gives me a knowing smile.

Seductive salsa plays over the normal airport din of TSA announcements, last calls for last flights, the crescendos and decrescendos of Spanish being spoken by the passers by. As I round the corner, a Latin woman, her black v-neck cut so low as to almost offer a view past the lace of her bra, down her cleavage and to her navel. She smiles at me and offers me a free mojito, a promotion of Bacardi rum.

In Dallas, a weird sort of nostalgia reigns, clinging to a mythical past of an “America” that never really existed and which has now been so totally corrupted that it is a faded simulacrum of itself (witness the Chinese-made Brooks Brothers shirts). It is tense. The TSA security reminders are constant. The citizenry dutifully looks around to make sure their belongings are near them. Ratcheting up the paranoia. The barbarians are at the gate. Everyone but the person in the mirror is to be blamed: Liberals, illegal aliens, socialists, uppity women, uppity niggers, faggots… terrorists. The mood is solemn and somber. That these are God’s warriors is underscored when the gate agent calls for a round of applause for “America’s heros,” because, “no matter your politics, freedom isn’t free.”

Freedom is free in Miami. It is our birthright. It is to be celebrated. If the barbarians are at the gate, perhaps we should invite them in for cocktails, perhaps they’ll contribute something new and exciting to the mix, to the diversity that actually makes America great. In Miami that which is annoying to the Dallas mindset is celebrated, this blend of homosexual, pansexual, lesbian, bare-ass shagging faggotry, atheist, Buddhist, Muslim, Deist, pantheist, socialist, liberal, anarchist, black, hispanic, asian, mixed, and oh yeah, white. I’m not talking about fuck anything fuck everything good for nothing low-riding pant hipster fuckwits, I’m talking about people, humanity, people who live and want to let live and who care deeply or at least care in waves when they’re allowed the chance to, the time to, between wondering how they’ll keep a roof over their heads and food on their table, the kids in school and grandma in the nursing home. I’m talking about the sea of humanity that is slowly but surely and constantly washing away at the utterly fictional monolith of “White, Christian America” in a flood of “If Rick Santorum would actually suck dick, maybe he could stop being one.”

I like Miami’s version of America better.

The Christian Right views professed “Christianity” as a litmus test for elected office. Somehow, it...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:30:00 -0500

The Christian Right views professed “Christianity” as a litmus test for elected office. Somehow, it assures them that a candidate has the underpinnings of the correct moral framework. Newt Gingrich might have had three wives, asked one of them to sign divorce papers while on her deathbed, had two affairs and sought a threesome, but he told Franklin Graham he’s a Christian, so Newt’s alright.

It’s utter bullshit.

Sketches of Brazil

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 06:31:00 -0500

I woke this morning with the 1964 Getz/Gilberto version of “The Girl from Ipanema” running through my head. Where this reverie comes from, I’ve no idea.

There are a few possibilities. A very lovely Brazilian woman has just become a “friend” of our store on Facebook. Sadly, I find that “friended” is already in the Apple Dictionary database and I remain, as always, amazed at the rapidity with which advertising bastardizations of the English language are accepted into the popular lexicon.

According to the popular lexicon as revealed by a brief search on duckduckgo.com, all Brazilian women have big asses, sport Brazilian bikini waxes and enjoy anal sex. Brazilian men also sport Brazilian bikini waxes, are muscular, are incredibly well endowed and also enjoy anal sex. I’ve no idea if any of this is true, but that is the depiction of Brazil in popular culture.

Of course, depictions of anything in popular culture are likely to be sophomoric at best and are nearly always superficial.

Brazil is exotic of course. It is far away from anywhere else, a world unto itself. The mix of cultures - Indian, African, European - and bloodlines have created a distinctly beautiful culture. The resultant beauty of this mix is reflected in her people as well. The Portuguese must have been the first to romanticize their crown colony. No doubt they mourned its loss like the loss of a lover.

Golden Age Hollywood depicted Brazil at the edge of the world, a refuge for romantics and scoundrels. Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, staring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant comes to mind.

Notorious is juxtaposed with a very disappointing movie titled Bed and Breakfast, disappointing because it held so much potential to be deeper and more humorous. It starred the very beautiful and very talented Juliana Paes. Paes is the living embodiment of every male’s adolescent fantasy about Brazilian women: Piercing dark eyes, olive skin, an hourglass figure and a smile that warms the room. Ultimately, it’s the hips. Adriana Lima is very beautiful, but she doesn’t have any hips. Helo Penheiro, the original girl from Ipanema, has hips.

Bed and Breakfast is also disappointing because it puts away romantic thoughts of Brazil and shows us instead a place that is very much like any other. Brazil is not frozen in time. Brazil too has lurched forward into the early-21st Century, the universal nightmare of global corporate capitalism and “progress.” Brazil too has its dissidents, those struggling against the dehumanization of rationalization. Pichação paints this dissent in broad strokes across the hulking skyline of São.

Last Saturday, it was Carnival. In Rio, the music was incessant, inescapable, the air filled with its throbbing and mixing with heat and scent of excited bodies. A couples made love on the beach as the sun came up, the heat between young bodies rivaling the heat of the night air until it feels as though their passion is nuclear, a heat to rival the warmth of the sun.

At home, a demure young woman was walking slowly down the street, her hips swaying gently in faded jeans that perfectly traced the curve of her body. She moves as if propelled by her own Samba, a Samba only she can hear. She was enjoying the coffee she had spilled on her hand, sucking on her fingers and smiling in the Rocky Mountain sun. I said “Hello” if only wanting to be part of the moment she had created, to hear the enticing beat of her music. She said “Olá! in return and I knew instantly she was from Brazil. It sounds close enough to Spanish, but there is something about the way Brazilian Portuguese trains the mouth that makes the accent of the speaker unmistakable.

I long to see her again…

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune of drawing Helene as my teller at the local bank. Helene is gorgeous, a slender face and figure, dressed in dark clothes that flow over her, fiery green eyes looking intensely at you framed by pale skin and black hair. She has that deep timbre to her voice that Brazilian women so frequently possess. This is augmented by the accent, that soft “ow” sound made by that dipthong that that is so common in the Portuguese and which so heavily and delightfully influences the way Brazilians speak English.

I arrived at the tale end of a discussion. Helene was relating a discussion she’d had with a customer about American “cuisine.” We have a number of frustrated cooks in our resort town. We call them line cooks. They call themselves “chefs.” He had been carrying on about the sophistication of American cuisine. Helene had inquired what was so sophisticated about hamburgers and french fries and he’d left in a huff.

I couldn’t help thinking about Poirot’s remark to Hastings. “The English do not have the cuisine, Hastings, they have the food.”

“Brazil. Now there’s a cuisine,” I said.

Helene smiled at me in a way that made the dull green glow of the florescent tubes warm. It was as if she was going to close her station, take me home and cook, feeding me one dish after the other of perfectly spiced food, the meal a feast of slow, passionate lovemaking.

Dreams of Exotic Destinations

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:16:06 -0500

I was in the waiting room for our local sushi bar the other day. It may strike as odd that a sushi bar has a waiting room, but the sushi bar is digitalized to a scale that made Japan an industrial powerhouse. It is absolutely Asian whereas the new Asian restaurant down the street, an import from New York in a space built by a developer from New Jersey with two stories of airspace and enough room to make even the most ample diner feel small serves what it bills as Japanese/Peruvian. One wonders what delights this fusion might produce, but as it’s ungodly expensive, you won’t read about it here.

The sushi bar is a small affair, family owned and operated. Its reputation for excellence assures that it generally gets quite a line waiting to sample it’s wonders. As a vegetarian, I am limited to the avocado rolls, the kapa maki and the miso soup, but all are sumptuously prepared with the freshest vegetables, so much so that I’ve contemplated asking them to get me a case of avocados in order to avoid the oddly colored fruits from Chile the local Safeway is peddling and which, once gotten into, are either hard as stones or rotten. It is the fish that most people come for, of course. There are few temptations to bring me back into the mainstream fold of mass produced slaughter but their fish is one of them. It is beautiful to behold. To watch it being prepared by the head chef/owner or by his very competent second is to watch artistry unfold, the knife wielded as elegantly as a Samurai or, closer the mark, a surgeon. What is produced is elegant and delectable to the eye, so much so that one is tempted to compare it to candy, but one realizes that the taste has more facets and runs much more deeply.

Waiting to pick up my to go order, I picked up an old copy of Outside. The cover was what had first attracted me. It had a picture of Alex Puccio in a bikini and the teaser promised several pages of photographs of the new extreme women athletes as beautiful as they are talented at their sports. More interesting though, was another tease promising a look at some remote island destinations.

It is the time of year when I begin to feel hemmed in by our little mountain valley and the weather and business. It is more agreeable this year. The lack of snow and the ability to sit outside in the sunshine in January has made it less taxing than usual. However, I generally dream of distant warm places and this time of year more than generally, so much so that it becomes a near obsession. Hours are spent on Kayak and various airline sites trying to figure out the cheapest and fastest way to get somewhere warm and tropical. I count coup with various acquaintances, trying to think if there’s anyone among them who would have me in their spare room or on the couch for a week’s visit to the mountains of Mexico or to Los Angeles, though for present purposes, Guanojuato sounds more romantic than L.A.. Various travel magazines and the travel section of the Sunday New York Times accumulate at an alarming rate stuffed into every vacant corner of our small townhouse with more hours spent on the net languishing mentally in the farthest corners of the world.

Sadly, the farthest corners of the world are not so far anymore. The Outside spread discusses the Cays off Belize They look beautiful with white sand beaches, palm trees and turquoise water. Precisely the ticket. The southern most Dalmatian island, off Croatia, looks appealing for the summer but I think of Europe in the winter and think grey and damp. The South Pacific retains its allure but are expensive and hard to get to. And then there’s Gorgona off the coast Columbia. This used to be a penal colony and comes replete with venomous snakes and sharks. Charming.

The trouble with all these places is that other people are already there or will be shortly arriving to destroy the natural and cultural authenticity of the place. The Cays off Belize, for instance, are billed by Outside as a “mere 12 hour commute from New York.” To be written up in a national magazine is the wet dream of any chamber of commerce… and the bane of any would-be traveller for precisely the same reason: Short of intervening State Department alert of terrorist threat, civil war or natural disaster, the hordes will descend.

I have often thought of travel writing and have done a couple of travel pieces for magazines that are, to the best of my knowledge, no longer in existence. However, the thought that I might actually introduce the destruction of mass tourism upon a place that I cared enough to write about keeps me from pursuing this particular avenue of creativity.

It’s quite silly really. There’s nothing one can do about it but hope Peak Oil arrives sooner rather than later. Of course, you won’t be going anywhere either, but things are going to get a lot more interesting at home.

In the same issue of Outside, the Cuban embargo is discussed. It is estimated that 1 million Americans will visit the island in the first year that the embargo is lifted. The race is on to get to Cuba before it’s ruined. Of course, the Europeans don’t have an embargo and are already there in droves sporting their Speedos, turning unpleasant shades of pink and encouraging the prostitution industry to thrive. In the Sunday New York Times of January 29, Mafia Island is discussed. The government of Tanzania has made a commitment that the southern half of the island should be a national park and that all tourism there should be low impact. Knowing the corruption of the Developing World, how will it be before some multi-national plops a 29 story “resort” hotel on the beach and Mafia Island goes the way of Madagascar? Do you contemplate Madagascar being an over-developed destination for charter flights? And did you know you can get an organized tour to Timbuktu?

The world is on the move. The Economist reports that Airbus and Boeing between them produced a record 1100 airliners last year and have a backlog of orders that will take nearly a decade to fill.

If you want to have an adventure someplace where other people aren’t having an “ADVENTURE!®” you’ll need to go further afield, places where the roads aren’t paved and where the airport can barely manage a Cessna, let alone a 747. Places, in other words, that the rest of the world has forgotten about and doesn’t care to remember. They will not be written about in the national travel press.

Sadly, if it isn’t mass tourism hurdling down the pike, some other form of development will make certain far away places less desirable: I’ve just read that Lamu on the coast of Kenya is going to be the terminus of an oil pipeline from South Sudan.

The Newt on the Moon

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 07:28:50 -0500

Newt Gingrich wants to live on the Moon. In Pensacola, just days before his crushing defeat at the hands of SuperPAC Man Mitt Romney, Newt assured Americans that, before the end of his second term, we would have a base on the moon.

This is the product of two fantasies converging.

Newt is prefers not to discuss details of the plan, or what we might actually be doing up there, instead vaguely alluding to the possibilities of scientific research, resource extraction and manufacturing. How a supply line to the Moon might be better for America than the current supply chain across the Pacific to East Asia is uncertain.

This is just cover for the Newt’s real agenda.

Newt imagines himself living on the Moon. In his mind, he is its absolute ruler, keeping the planetoid safe for corporate capitalism and protected from healthcare. The fittest only will be allowed and, if they get get to old or sick, they will be left to fend for themselves, scraping a living from the barren rock, begging alms from the church but still breathing easily in the atmosphere of freedom.

Newt himself will finally be happy there. He’ll be properly respected and obeyed by a grateful populace, just as he’s always known he should be. He’ll live in the Lunar White House with his consenting wife and his mistress.

Sometimes, the fantasy runs deeper. Newt must save humanity from itself and the only way to ensure this is to breed a race of Super Newts.

It’s lonely at the top. It’s just Newt and the young women he’s hand selected to breed with. The ships still come from Earth, bringing the new “Companions” and necessary supplies - pork rinds, gin and Viagra.

As he’s done so many times before, Newt is willing to sacrifice himself for our well-being.

Holiday Cards from Hell

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:55:00 -0500

It’s mid-January. It’s that time of year when W. and I take stock of the Holiday season just past, catch our breath and plan for the rest of the winter. It is also the time to reorganize.

Housekeeping generally falls apart during the fourth quarter, somewhere between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve, the house will start resembling a college dorm room - cozy and comfortable, but disheveled, with piles of clean and dirty clothes stacked here and there on various pieces of furniture, the floor, piles of “only worn once” merging with both their cleaner and dirtier counterparts.

One contemplates what to do with the Christmas cards. We are blessed with a number of friends and distant family members who still hold to this archaic ritual.

There are contemporary permutations of this, of which the Annual Family Newsletter is the most irksome. In one reading, one is subjected to the nauseating particulars about all the delightful activities and meritorious efforts each and every one family member accomplished throughout the year.

We are given all the tedious details include how Grandma took her first cruise, danced with strange men and ate at the captain’s table on the adventure filled trip from Miami to Paradise Island; the fact that little Melvin has raised his grade point average up to a 2.3 “We’re average people after all,” is the quip, giggle, giggle, giggle; and that little Jamie received the “Most Likely to Succeed” award at her eighth grade commencement, an achievement almost universally met as good news despite the fact that it practically guarantees she won’t.

Sadly, all the salacious details that might actually make for interesting reading are omitted or glossed over. We never hear, for instance, about how Junior was expelled from school for two weeks after being caught in flagrante delicto with the senior quarterback in the boys bathroom. Nor do they write about Grandpa’s new enjoyment of high pressure colonics, or the fact that little Ginny had her cherry popped in the back of Uncle Bob’s Toyota Camry on prom night.

Lacking anything amusing, there’s nothing to be done with these little bits of suburban bliss but to toss them into the shredder and hope they don’t gum up the works.

Christmas cards used to be delightful affairs, beautiful or at least cute, photographs, or funny cartoons picturing Santa doing something naughty. These we would take and, having enjoyed both the card and the message inscribed, would cut off the message and save the remaining postcard to label packages next year. Yes, that is a grim reminder: As of this writing, there are only 341 shopping days left until Christmas.

A growing number of people now send out photo Christmas cards of what they must think was the defining moment of the previous year: This is us, happy together at Lake Okapachoga; this is us learning how to skydive; this is our dog; this is the product of our love; this card sent to you from the new gold digging wife, who wanted to make sure to let you know, once again, that she actually did get married to your dear friend back in May, in the desert outside of Timbuktu with her two vacant children looking on and that it entitles her to entrance into your society… well, not your society, because you’re not nearly rich enough and she thinks your friend should have a better class or at least wealthier friends and that your friend shouldn’t be hanging out with you despite the fact that you actually loved and cared for him all those years.

One’s not really sure what to do with these. They can’t be recycled and it seems a shame to waste them, the world being what it is today and dying and all that.

W. has suggested that perhaps we should send them out as our own cards next year. I’ve decided that this is, in fact, a splendid solution.

It sounded like I interrupted her. She was breathing heavily and speaking in broken sentences. She...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:01:26 -0500

It sounded like I interrupted her. She was breathing heavily and speaking in broken sentences. She was either crying or having sex. Either way, I’m not really sure why she answered the phone

The New Software

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:58:38 -0500

The arrival of new software at our store always feels as though it is heralding the dawning of a new age. Things will be better now, more organized, more efficient… easier. The Sun will come out from behind the clouds, the birds will dance in the blue sky, and the angels will sing.

In the eight years or so we’ve been running our store (it’s going on ten now but I don’t really feel it’s been time spent doing something worthwhile, so I give myself time off for good behavior) this makes the fourth attempt at finding software that will actually perform the tasks we would like it to perform, or perform the tasks it purports to perform, which might at least get us to the point of being able to tweak the software or our habits in order to arrive at a mutual understanding of a common framework for general agreement of how things are going to work in order that we can work together.

I am always optimistic in this regard. I have, after all, seen a great deal of progress with respect to the PC. My first “computer” was a Sharp or Casio typewriter that had a tiny grey digital screen which allowed one to review what one had written and check the spelling before printing the next line of text.

The first actual computer I encountered was a three box daisy-chained affair that was supposedly the reservation system for my father’s hotel. The first box was, of course, the server, and the other two were terminals. My father always insisted that the manual system should stay in place in case the computer broke down, which it did, frequently, so the hotel never got much further than the manual system, except that now they were able to print out confirmation slips on a track feed printer the produced text that was nearly impossible to read and which required a CIA operative’s experience with ciphers in order to understand what precisely the print out was meant to confirm.

I was undaunted by this actuality. I was enthralled with Star Trek and I was quite certain that one day computers would do really useful things.

Of course, they have become more useful, at least at home. Research, writing, correspondence with friends and business contacts and publishing are all done sitting around in my bathrobe. Some people do these things at work too, I gather.

Over the past decade at the store, we’ve replaced the IBM system we inherited and hobbled together refurbished or used boxes of dubious origin and concentrated on software. Stores the size of ours can easily spend $25,000 on software that is uniquely tailored to their specific niche of the retail industry. Most stores don’t have this sort of budget so they are stuck buying out of the box point of sale software that they hope they will be able to customize enough to meet their particular needs.

There are myriad options to choose from in this regard: Microsoft and Intuit are the major players of course, Microsoft building on its MS Office platform and Intuit building on Quickbooks but there are literally dozens of others, some working on cloud servers, some open source. If you ever need a POS system for your small business, by all means, drop me a line. I’ve researched every one of them, often into the wee hours of the morning, looking for the holy grail of software that will do everything we need it to do at a price we can afford.

I’ll save you the trouble. It doesn’t exist. It is not that any person with reasonable knowledge of computers and a good understanding of business can’t find a way forward with an out of the box solution, but unless your experience includes programming DOS or DBAS, you can forget about customization.

Working within the framework provided then, one is first required to translate the terms the software is using to match the language of your business. There is a strange disconnect here: Business generally runs on the language of accounting. However, you will find that there are any number of different terms one can use to describe the concept of house accounts, whereby the store extends credit to and bills a customer. It took me approximately two hours to discover the term our new software used to describe this fairly simple concept.

Software engineers have their own language. It often sounds like English but it is patently not, particularly when “Customer Support” is located in the suburbs of Islamabad, a few doors over from Osama bin Laden’s former dwelling.

There are always indications that customization of your unique data will be possible. One can program “Categories” and “Families,” in our latest electronic incarnation which sounds as though it might actually generate something useful. We used to call “Families” “Departments” to indicate from section of our vast operation (3000 square feet) our sales emanated. However, one of our basic accounting needs is to have a daily reporting of “Department,” now “Family,” sales. This is handily printed, without tweaking, on our daily report.
A few months into the software, however, we found that an alarming number of transactions are still credited to None, meaning that the products sold have not been assigned a Dep… Family. It would seem that searching for these unassigned items in the products database would be a fairly simple affair. Just sort by Family and find products where Family is blank. This report would have printed approximately 145 pages if it weren’t for MacIntosh’s excellent “Print Preview” feature. The new software has it’s own “Print Preview” feature, but this tends to freeze the system. And the report did not, by the way, reveal which of our products did not have anything entered into “Family.” This was done manually, painstakingly going through each item in the products database.

The staff completed this task over the course of a couple of weeks. On the daily reports, we still found an inordinate number of items not categorized into a Family. The dimmest of us suggested that perhaps one had to have the Family properly labeled and nothing in Category. A few more weeks of manual entry and we find that this is, in fact, the case. So much for customization.

Software engineers live in a fantasy world in which every one of their customers has an IT expert on hand or on call to assist them . Thus, that annoying message: INCORRECT (insert whatever action you were asking your software to perform here) PLEASE CONTACT YOUR IT ADMINISTRATOR FOR ASSISTANCE.

I am the fucking IT Administrator. I am also the Marketing Department, Advertising, Human Resources, Bookkeeping, Administration, Head of Sales and Janitor. If I’ve missed anything small business owners do in the course of being the “backbone of America” it’s because I’m tired. What I want to be doing is selling stuff. That is the way I make money. My productivity is not measured in time wasted, but in dollars and cents.

One of the things I don’t have a lot of time for is babysitting software, which is really what all of it wants. It wants you to spend time with it, to get to know it, to get to know how it defines things, how it does things, how it reports things and learn how to input data the way it wants it. It wants your staff to spend time with it as well and go through this relationship building process. This is generally ok with the staff who would rather spend time in front of the computer learning what sort of new cool shit the software can do and have an excuse to be checking Reddit, Facebook and now Couchsurf for Christ’s sake, instead of actually working.

Our new software is supposed to track inventory, track sales, instantly put our inventory online and report on all these things. It does all of these things. Nominally. Our inventory is consistently out of whack because, well, we’ve been in business since 1986 and are open 14 hours a day and didn’t have time to shut down for a complete inventory during the month leading up to the Holidays. We’ll get correct sales reports just as soon as we’ve found every last one of the products that have been assigned both a Family and a Category. The products are up on the website, but one can’t order anything off it. In other words, getting it to work perfectly, or at least as advertised, will require spending some more time with it. A lot more time.

All systems tend toward chaos: The time we feed babysitting our new software will drain time away from other projects that could possibly be more lucrative or at least save things from falling apart altogether.

This in mind, I’m thinking that our next computer might well be a cash register… or an abacus.

I’m very excited about Peak Oil. It’ll be just like camping out, except we’ll be...

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 19:06:00 -0500

I’m very excited about Peak Oil. It’ll be just like camping out, except we’ll be digging holes in our back yards instead of the woods to use for toilets and we’ll never have to go home.

I’ve been reading The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler. The discussion is about the...

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:32:32 -0500

I’ve been reading The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler. The discussion is about the converging catastrophes of our time: Peak oil and Global Climate Change.

In it he posits that suburbanites, addicted to their fossil fuel based lifestyle and believing themselves entitled, will cling to it against all logic, scapegoating those they think are to blame.

It appears to me that the long emergency, and the scapegoating, have begun. What else could possibly explain the emergence of the Tea Party movement and the rabid right of the Republican party? Homophobic, xenophobic and totally adverse to any discussion of societal change, screaming at the top of their lungs about how badly they’ve been wronged by Obama’s and Pelosi’s alleged “socialism.”