Rivers and Roads, rivers till I reach you.

He died. I knew it was coming. I found out yesterday. It was in a cordial email that said that the services would be in three different places and if I couldn't make it I should find a way to remember and celebrate him. It happened 22nd of October, in the early morning. While I was complaining. After a two hour flight from New York and then a three hour bus ride from Chicago, I arrived in South Bend. It was three in the morning. I decided to walk home. There wasn't any particular reason. It wasn't a lovely night. It was just another night with no self inscribed meaning. My eyes still ached from the transition between the confines of the bus to the stadium lighting at the university. I couldn't see a single person in the parking lot, only the distant intrusion of drunken cackles. The cans crunched under my boots as I trudged along greeted by the sour stink of beer, vomit, and urine. Rolls of paper towels flapped in the wind like grounded kites, and the few ice chests that were left behind hung open like broken jaws before the row of porta-johns that lined the road along the perimeter of the campus. 

I'd like to think that I was forced to stay up to see him off. The way people sometimes pop into your head before you get a phone call from them. Maybe death works the same way. Although I didn't think about him, he didn't pop into my head. I knew he was dying. He's been in pain since the day we met. Dying since the day we met. His absence is a tragedy, but his death was a relief.

I wonder if someone was there to say bye? Did someone hold his hand? Did he finally hear the words he spent his entire life saying to someone else? It's going to be alright.

I've seen hundreds of dead people. They get to be objects. Things that we clean. Things that we describe. Natural causes. An arrest. A bleed. Liver failure. A fulminant. Things that we put in the ground. I never saw the absent gaze of a person I knew.  My cousin committed suicide when I was a kid, but I never got to look at him. I remember seeing him when we went to the ranch. He was my age, but much more serious.  Nobody ever talks about him. He killed himself in the height of adolescence. Grave adolescence, before life could give its punchline.

I watch the people in the Park in Queens. Couples walking with light smiles. Gestures I perceive as laughter. I envy others because the the happiness I project onto them is always an impossible one. I know we all suffer. I know that all happy people are unhappy in their own way, but as I get older I find that logic is just a stupid craving that we get when we're beyond the problem. We can look back at the idiocies of ourselves and others with a smug grin and try to make sense out of things all the stupid things that either make no sense, or make too much sense. Birth and death, of relationships, of jobs, of ourselves.

I only spoke to him once, from the time he started hospice to the time he died. I called a few times before, but there was no answer. As I called, I remembered listening to the ringing and growing anxious because the words leaked out of me as I waited for him to answer. The sentences, the words, the jokes all gone. Sometimes I was glad he didn't answer. Glad I didn't sound like a fool, when I'd ask, "How's it going? or how are you feeling?" When I finally did get through, he answered my call with his eternal patience and listened as I talked about myself. I always do. I'm not good at asking. I don't know how to ask questions. Questions, from my own mouth, always sound alien to me.

I rambled for the first ten minutes of the conversation, afraid that my voice would fall out of my mouth and break into a thousand pieces on the floor. I can't remember the way he looks. I have a picture of him, but the one in my head is already fading. His voice is clear. The last words, "I'm tired, Jorge."  

 

Songs by Juanito Efectivo: Variables, equations, star signs, and the art of thanking your parents. (6)^2

6^{2 - Life as a series of songs presented by Johnny Cash}

 Father and Son
This is about my return home, in 2014.
I'd left my hometown almost 8 years before. I set out as if with sword in hand thinking I was going to conquer the world, but returned hungry, divorced, and clutching, instead of the heroic blade, the pommel of a dull butter knife. Those eight years had switched out the sword while I wasn't looking. Even though those eight years didn't go the way I wanted them to go, my dad didn't seem to care. He seemed to take pride in anything that I did. All that mattered to him was that I was home.

My ex-wife told me that the most devastating part about being away from home was that her parents aged in the gaps of time while she was gone. Upon her return she noticed that they walked slightly less upright, that they rambled a bit more, or that their soft touch was a bit more wrinkled than the time before. I was oblivious to this until the first time I came home. Both of my parents seemed to have aged. I don't think I would have noticed if I had never left. We're all getting old, we're all dying, etc. The immortal parent figure was gone. Suddenly there seemed to be a timer. Ticking down. There was this anxious voice in the back of my head whispering the ominous countdown in the back of my head. The people you love are going to start dying.

It didn't prevent me from leaving again. I left to Spain. I spent three years there. I came back. Found my dad older. Again, it didn't prevent me from leaving. I'm in Indiana now, but in that time that I spent there I was able to appreciate my dad's presence a bit more. Everyday before work we'd sit down at the table and have a coffee together. We'd talk about ourselves, we'd exchange stories, sometimes we'd retell the stories we'd forgotten we'd told. It set the tone for the day. Even now, before I begin my day I take a seat, sip my coffee and think about my day. My dad is missing from the table, but it's the ritual that reminds of him. My dad has always been a sort of accomplice. I'm thankful for that.

 

  Heart of Gold
I'm used to doing things on my own. It's difficult for me to let others do things for me. It's equally difficult for me to talk about the logic of my decision making. They're flaws I know; as I get older I realize that they only get worse, and I understand why dating websites charge more for men if they're in their late thirties and still single.

My mom always wants to make days special, and always asks why? I think I owe what little artistic ability I have to my mother. Her super power has always been her critical eye and because of that she is very good at party planning. Creating imaginary worlds for six-year-olds to celebrate, destroy and gobble up with an attitude of Carpe Diem that the Dead Poets society could only dream about. There's almost something Buddhist in watching all of my mother's careful planning be destroyed by my drunken family.  If only parties were something that could be preserved in jars or on paper as works of art. The best part about my mother is that she honors my party decision no matter how ridiculous. I always make them as ridiculous as possible in the hopes that she might say no, but she always comes up with something very impressive. Zombies? Fine. Dinosaurs? Fine. Cannibals? Done!

My mother's other super power is asking why. She always wants to know the why. It's impossible for the social wall to withstand the siege of my mother's why. One day I'll have all the answers to why. I'm sure if she were writing this post she would say, "My son's super power is avoiding questions or saying, I don't know."

What does it feel like to watch your children grow old? To maintain seventeen years of distance. I don't mean in the silly junior could barely walk and now he's going to prom way. I mean, I'll never get old in my mother's time. That difference between us won't shrink. I'll always be that same age away, but still getting older. I'm sure she's noticed. My pimples, taste in clothing, and ashy skin never escaped her scrutiny, but for some reason she hasn't ever mentioned my aging, or what she feels like when I come home after being away so long. It's never anything more than, "oh you have a beard," or "who cut your hair?"

AddStep-father and the father sing, "Have you seen her," by the Chi-lites? Not many.

Un foraster no és un agent forestal. Bye Serrano Ham and Sobrasada! Without Mallorca, life won't ever be the same again.

My roommate's mother is in town. I'm not a misanthrope. I swear it. She's a nice lady. She looks like a sun-kissed raisin with a pair of stark, mint green eyes. She reminds me of an elderly version of that Afghan girl on the cover of that National Geographic from 1985.  Sweet. Garrulous. Sincere. Chatty. Kind. Loquacious. Mystical. She talks a lot. What begins as a passing salutation turns into a stop and chat that leaves knots on the bottom of your feet and the back of your knees aching from shuffling around because you want to leave. When she's in town I find myself listening at my bedroom door to make sure I avoid her. She's been here for two weeks already. I have managed to avoid her that entire time. Well today, after I had gone down to the park to throw a few of my things out, I ran into her on the stairs. I was distracted. I didn't see her coming down the steps. I might have been safe had I ducked into the elevator instead of taking the stairs.Who would have thought that being lazy would have its merits. There was nothing I could do. No way for me to retreat. Within moments she spilled all of her anxieties onto the stairwell and proceeded to mop them about with my ears. Her conversations are a flight of ideas. Picture a heavy artillery gun firing Pictionary topics into the sky while this mother snatches them out of the air as the conversation goes on. I think she was tired of being locked in a room with her daughter. I feel bad because the conversation actually cheered me up. I hate being cheered up. She handed me a flashlight in a tunnel. She said, "The George you are now, is going to stay here with his friends. He's not leaving Mallorca, so don't be sad. Your friends won't be lonely because they'll remember the times you spent here together. There's a new chapter. Empty yourself. and now you can go on filling those empty pages with new people, new places, and new words." It was intense. Before I knew it we were about an hour into a conversation while teetering on a narrow stairwell.

The last thing she told me was to be like a dresser. "If you open all the drawers on dresser, it falls over. Make sure you only open the right drawer for the right moment." 

These are a few of the drawers I opened in my time here on this Roqueta in the Mediterranean.  

La Seu, the Cathedral of Palma

Yesterday, I said goodbye to one of my classes. The teacher warned them that I would be leaving and they all drew pictures for me. It was going well, but thinking back I'm sure that they didn't understand that I wasn't coming back next year. That is until one of them asked, "But we'll see you next year, right?" I shook my head. The girl started crying. I looked over at the teacher, thinking she might do something to save me, but she offered nothing. This teacher is usually apt at dealing with the student's and their emotions, but this reaction caught even her off guard. I looked over at the teacher and said, "I don't know what to do." I wasn't going to lie to the little girl. I walked over gave the girl a hug and told her she would be okay. Dealing with emotional outbursts isn't my forte. It's hard to believe that even after 35 years of life I'm still a novice. I think this was the toughest part of my time as nurse.Nurses aren't supposed lie. It's unethical. If a patient asks you if everything is going to be okay you can't tell them, yeah it's all going to be fine, don't worry about that operation where we chop out your liver and switch it out with another one from a dead person, chill dude. My answer was often, it's hard to say. It depends on how the patient responds to treatment. You have to master the art of saying something without meaning anything. There's no definitive answer. Not all patients react the same, BLAH BLAH BLAH. I might be the worst person to come to if you need reassurance.

Two experiences marked my time on the island of Mallorca. The first involved a conversation with a nun. In Palma, I got placed at a Catholic school. I have very little personal experience with nuns or with religion in general other than a few friends who belonged to all sorts of evangelical sects in Texas. I have to confess my ignorance. The other thing to keep in mind is that although I speak Spanish the language is quite different depending on the country and the context. If you don't believe me try asking for an alfajor de Cajeta in Argentina and see what kind of response you get. Back to the story. The nuns ran the school. Their roles in class were limited to religion, but once in a while I'd see one nun with a guitar slung across her back. I remember walking down the hall one day and hearing something that I thought was the Mamas and the Papas and awing when I saw that same nun jamming out in a classroom with a group of students. Well one day, while standing in the break room the head nun, who had pretty much ignored me until that point approached me. She was a plucky nun with a cowboy swagger and eyes like coal. She was in charge. I froze. Thinking that maybe I'd done something wrong. Then I was caught off guard when she said, "Can we count on you to be here tomorrow?" Just so you know, tomorrow was my day off. I didn't want to come in on my day off. Thinking I could weasel out of it I asked her what they were going to do. Her response, was (I'll give this in Spanish) Para el follón. Now those of you who have gone to Spanish 101 know that para el means, for the. She said, "For the____. 

I had never heard the word follón, but I had heard the word follar, which means to screw, and I'm not talking about putting an IKEA table together. The nearest translation to Para el Follón is, for some fuckery. Later on I found out that Follón meant the party, but you can imagine where my mind went. I was horrified. I tried to keep a straight face. I took a cue from the other teachers who didn't seem to think anything of the phrase. It seemed like a pretty normal word. 

The second experience was my first time getting naked at the beach. In Spain you have to get used to nudity. There's no way around it. It's everywhere. Whether it's one of your roommates, the neighbor, or a beach-goer, nudity is everywhere. I learned this in Menorca when I watched a naked, 80 year-old man have a conversation with an eight year-old boy and his topless mother in the spot right next to ours at the beach. The old man sat behind us on the bus back to Mahon. It took us a while to recognize him with his clothes on. I have to admit that I'm a bit of  a prude when it comes to nudity. I'd never gone skinny dipping, and I had no intention of ever doing it. That day was a perfect storm of heat, exertion, and absent mindedness. We fled the city in hurry, and the beach was about an hour cycling followed by a thirty minute hike. Other than a nude couple, there wasn't anybody there. 

Torrent de Pareis

That day, drenched in sweat from hike and bike ride, there was nothing I wanted more than to hop into the water. In the summer the sweltering heat forces you to the coast. Luckily, Mallorca is the sea. A blue so transparent that when you leap into the water you panic momentarily thinking you might plummet to the bottom. You can't help but stare as the sun glistens off of every ripple in the water. It's hypnotic. It was at that moment, while I day dreamed of my first leap into the blue that I realized I had left my swimming trunks on the bed at home. I searched my backpack, I searched everything that we brought, but to no avail. I had resigned myself to dipping my feet at the water's edge, when Laura suggested to me that I swim naked. It seemed nuts! I told her she was crazy. Well I tried to wait it out but the sun had other plans. Eventually I gave in and did it. Now the best part about swimming nude or being nude is that your nakedness gives you a kind of anonymity. Think about the last time you saw a naked person. Did you look at their face? There's something in the brain that simply registers them as naked and forces you to look away. The worst part about swimming naked is that you don't have any clothes on. I went with the flow and when people started to arrive at the beach I felt so anonymous that I didn't care. The next day, when I recounted this to one of the teachers at school she she told me that she had given up on going topless after one of the students in her class saw her at the beach. That was a bit unsettling.    

Olive Trees in Deiá

The Mallorquin's greatest weakness: Jellyfish. It seems like everyone I met had been stung at least once in their childhood and for that reason when you go to the beach the first question a stranger asks is if there were Medusas in the water.(Jellyfish=Medusas) I recall one scorching day in late June. The city of Palma was in the middle of a heat wave and we decided to head out to a beach nearby. We arrived to find that the beach was covered in sunbathing locals, but no one was swimming. We set our things down and stepped up onto the a rocky cliff that projected out over the sea. I prepared myself to jump, but before I could dive in I heard someone shout for me to stop. I turned to see a woman hustling over waving with one arm. I figured there was a shark, man-of-war, or that I was jumping into the only patch of water that was owned by this lady. I stopped myself. She told me that someone had seen a jellyfish in the water. I turned and looked at the crowd of beach goers. Most of them were taking sun, lying there oblivious to the fact that I was about to dive in. They didn't seem to care, but there was a small group that watched me longingly. I imagined that they were waiting to see if I was stubborn enough to jump in. I can't think of anything  worse than going to the beach and not being able to get in. I wasn't about to take the chance. Instead, I joined the group of miserable sunbathers, shared the oppressive heat with them, and waited only to find out later that it was a plastic bag and not a jellyfish. What the hell do I know about jelly fish? If all the Mallorquins were afraid of the animal I figured there was a healthy reason for it. Until that moment my experience with jellyfish was limited to that bit of common knowledge that jellyfish stings made it somehow okay to get a golden shower. 

Campanet Valley

The Mallorquin's greatest strength: In all of my travels I have never met a group of people who were able to enjoy life quite as much as the Mallorquins. It's a European stereotype that the Spanish, in general, have an insatiable thirst for life. They work to live, not live to work, BLAH BLAH BLAH. The Mallorquins however approach everything little thing with authenticity. Take the Pa Amb Oli for instance. Pa Amb Oli literally means, bread and oil. It's Mallorca's culinary claim to fame. It's simple, and to be honest it would have never crossed my mind that bread and olive oil could be meal until I heard it described by a Mallorquin. First you toast a bit of rustic wheat bread. No Wonder bread. The bread here looks like something you'd see a medieval peasant or feudal king tear into at a feast. It's beautiful bread. Serious bread. Then you take a tomato from the garden, slice it in half, and rub the tomato onto the toasted side of the bread. Afterward you drizzle a bit olive oil over the top and garnish with a pinch of Ibizan sea salt. Voila. If you're feeling frisky you can add some Serrano ham, or Mahon cheese, but it's great plain. They usual add a few crushed olives and Fonoll Mari (a pickled herb that's a cross between fennel and seaweed). 

The Mallorquin accent is very particular. 

Muro Pumpkin Festival

I can always pick out a Mallorquin. It's the same thing that happened with Pittsburghers. I could be on the other side of the world and I'd always be able to pick it out. Another thing about the Mallorquin accent is that it is highly contagious. I often find myself speaking English with the Mallorquin intonations.

By far my favorite thing about Mallorca is the elderly, especially the old Mallorquins with their rich accent and sing song sentences. I love to sit in the plaza and watch them shuffle around until they find a seat. Their conversation peppered with idioms completely unknown to the younger generations. I'll miss all of those old people I heard every morning on my walk to school but never met .

Things that I'll miss:
The polite way the elderly say hello on the elevator.
The way the elderly brush you aside at the supermarket so they can bag their groceries.
The way the cashiers at the Mercadona (Supermarket) scan and toss your groceries down the conveyor belt as if you were playing supermarket sweep.
The way the cashiers at the Mercadona expect you to quit bagging to pay them.
The way the cashiers at the Mercadona scan and toss the next person in line's groceries down the conveyor belt onto all of your stuff as if the next person in line were playing supermarket sweep, and if she's elderly she's gonna shove you out of the way, so you better hurry the hell up because grandma's got places to go and people to see, bitch!

Terrace Dining  with Chema and Irene.

Eating on the terrace.
Eating on the terrace in the winter.

Career waiters. I will miss them the most. They're like firefighters. Call them when you need them. Wave them over, they won't get offended. Sign the check in the air, they don't care. Best of all they take their job seriously. They also ignore you. Which is lovely. American servers can be cumbersome. One word of advice, though. When you get to the restaurant, don't lollygag or grab ass around. Take control of the menu, decide, and order. If they come and you tell them you're not ready the wait staff won't be back until you've forgotten what you wanted. They also love the banter, so don't take yourself too serious. If they make fun of you it's because they like you.

We called her Yoko Jamono, Le Swoon!

Ham. Spanish ham is the best, so much so, in fact, that the first thing I bought when I moved to Spain was a giant ham leg. There was a massive cardboard box in the middle of the grocery store with these ham legs tossed inside. Tell your congressman, your senator, your mayor: IMPORT HAM NOW!! Dying with a slice of Spanish ham in your mouth wouldn't be such a bad way to die.

The Serra Tramuntana.
The almond trees blossom in February.
The twisted olive trees were my favorite; their knots bulged out from the trunk like wind beaten trolls. Dali couldn't of dreamed such a landscape.

Brunch sucks Vermouth is king!

During lent they cut one of  Grandma's legs off 

every week until Easter.

I'll miss my students and especially their honesty. An example of this manifested itself over the winter. I have to say that I never pay much attention to how often I wear certain clothes. Whether I wore something last week isn't something that crosses my mind, in the morning. The kids do, however, notice these things. I hadn't noticed that I had been wearing the same flannel shirt every Tuesday for three weeks.That day when the teacher stepped out of the classroom for a second one of the students raised her hand and asked me, "Why do you always wear the same clothes to school?" The kid asked me in Spanish. Another responded, "It's because he doesn't have any." I found myself in a dilemma, because the students weren't supposed to know that I understood or spoke Spanish. I knew exactly what they had asked and it took everything in me not to laugh. The entire thing culminated when the teacher returned and the kids asked him the same question. He avoided answering the question. He made the same uncomfortable face to the kid that my dad made to me when I asked him what a condom was. Then the teacher began to lecture them on rude behavior, while he handed out jars of tempura paints. The words stumbled out of his mouth as he avoided addressing the fact that I had indeed been wearing the same shirt every Tuesday for three weeks.

La Rosa

To the teachers. I’ve got that anxious ache in my stomach. Like it's trying to run away without me. It could be the coffee I just drank. That could be the reason, but I’m sure it’s not. I'm anxious for the next step. Anxious to say goodbye. I know I'm going to miss this place. I'll be afraid to come back because things might not be same. The truth is that we won’t be the same people that we were these past years, because we'll grow and change.I wish I could make everything stop until I came back. My friends would stay in the exact same spot. Their children wouldn’t grow, their lives wouldn’t go on until I came back and took my same old place at the table. 

When you’re traveling all you know is change. Keep your feet moving. Don’t stop, don’t stumble, step, step, step. Living from one memory to the next. Longing for the place I was just at. This is the first time that I wanted to stay. It’s as if I were leaving home. 

I recall the nervous look on all the teacher's faces in the weeks leading up to my departure. "Don't you want to stay?" They'd ask me. "Isn't it going to be hard to leave?" They'd say. Some even went as far as to tell me, "You're practically Mallorquin you can't leave, the island won't let you."

"What will you miss the most?" Was the most common question. It was the one that was most difficult to answer.
The best answer I can think of was, "the quality of life." There's something about being able to walk to work that makes your life better. Not to mention the fact that your vegetable shop owner is a person who not only takes pride in arranging the fruit into meticulous pyramids, but even offers conversation and political opinion free of charge. Better yet, if you disagree you can even tell him or her that they're nuts. They'll simply laugh it off. People here, at least for the time being, are still people. Not the automatons with their heads craned over their phones, I have come to see everywhere else. Their vacant stares illuminated by the periwinkle glow from off of their retina screens. Not that I'm any better. I too have a phone. My stare is just as vacant. All I'm saying is that it was nice to remember that I was once a person, too.

Things I won't miss:

Drunk, beet red tourists, stumbling around the city. 

Swing, and its ubiquitous nature.

To travel is to lose countries. To constantly be someone else. That is what Pessoa said. I feel like I always understood the second phrase better than the first. When you're traveling there is nothing in the other culture to pin you to the person you were back home. You can play whatever role you want. Strangers take you as you are or for who they think you might be. The first phrase is a bit more difficult to understand. It's common knowledge that the more you do something the easier doing said thing becomes. Practice makes perfect: shooting baskets, writing sentences, inserting IVs, teaching English. I'd say the maxim is true about everything except saying good bye. It only ever gets harder. I can't seem to lie to myself about the possibility of never seeing them again. I hope I'm wrong. I'll miss Mallorca. Adeu.  

Adeu Mallorca, Fins després.

My first solo backpacking trip: Peru, an introduction. pt 1

It seems like I've always been traveling. In a car. Mom's house. Dad's house. Grandma one, Grandma two, Grandma three. El Paso, Juarez, Las Cruces, Chaparral, Clint. One dusty road at a time. Mostly it was because of dad's work, and partly because I hated taking naps and there weren't many babysitters in El Paso willing to put up with a kid who wouldn't sleep. Dad's a welder. I loved going to work with my dad; especially when the customers (mostly the elderly with a soft spot for a chubby kid) brought out coke and gummy worms for me to eat while I helped my dad work.

About a year ago my dad told me that he knew the reason I had left El Paso. He talked about it the way children talk about their parent's when they die of cancer, as if they could have done something about it. Pried those cigarettes out of their hands. "I always wondered what would have happened if I would have let you go explore that mountain?" My dad said to me. He traced it all back to a time a when I was seven-years-old. He said we were out driving near the Franklin Mountains on our way to a job site when I turned and asked him, "What's behind the mountain?" More mountains, was my dad's response. I marveled at the answer. Parent's words are magic. I remembered thinking to myself. It's true they're endless! Seven-year-olds don't understand sarcasm. My dad said that the answer didn't seem to make me happy and before my dad could turn onto the interstate he said I asked him to pullover. He did.

He told me that I pointed out an area at the base of a hill covered in yucca plants with a few orange boulders that poked out over the cacti. Then, according to dad, I turned to him and said, "Just leave me here.You go to work. I'll go up there and explore the mountain. When you're done, come and get me. Then I'll tell you all about it." He said I was trying to bribe him with the last part, and as you can imagine my dad did what any other sane parent would do. He continued driving. But after I left El Paso to move abroad that scenario must have lingered in my dad's head.

He could be right. Maybe going up there would have purged that longing to explore from my system. Maybe I would have walked out into the desert and realized that the world was a frightening place, where the wilderness howls as wind or wolf, and there are no stores, or soft places to sleep at night. Maybe I would have realized that I was small and alone. Maybe that day I would have seen that the world could suck you up and forget about you until someone else walked by and found my corpse. You get the picture.

Cuzco, Peru

Instead, I grew obsessed with backpacking, camping, and hiking.  I started reading National Geographic, and journals about the Oregon Trail. I imagined myself in those times walking endlessly towards a place I wasn't sure existed, through landscapes I could only imagine. I wanted adventure.

That day, with my dad, I looked over to the side of the road and saw more than a low, wide peak. That day I realized that the world ended just on the other side of the Franklins because the world was the Franklins.

The thing about backpacking is that you never actually become proficient unless you do it.  In order to improve at anything you've gotta make mistakes and hope that they don't kill you in the process. I'm not an expert. I'm an amateur backpacker who hasn't made any mistakes big enough to kill him, yet. This is the first post about my first failure.Which didn't involve much camping or hiking, but I carried a backpack around Peru and eventually got to my destination.

My heart is in Menorca: The Jaleo, or me at my best and most foolish.

I was about to be crushed by a rearing horse when I found out that the people of Menorca had five eyes.

They have no choice.

When you stuff the main square of your town with a few hundred people (Mostly drunk people) and have a parade of horses file in five-at-a-time then you don't have much of a choice, especially if the thought of being dragged out of the crowd on a stretcher doesn't appeal to you.That day I saw a man knocked unconscious by a hoof, and you will hardly believe how unaware he was of the misstep.

"Hay que tener cinco ojos," The man who pulled me out from under the horse before it came smashing down on me from above said. (You have to have five eyes.)

 I weaved through the mob both seeking and avoiding the massive black horses that trotted back and forth within the square. The hooves snapped like crocodile jaws and the sand erupted towards the sky in plumbs of brown smoke. My heart pounded as the horses kicked and foamed while the mosh pit roared around them. The mud struck me in the face and arms. It was like the first time I had ever gone to a charismatic church. Jolted by the congregation as they spoke in tongues and dropped to the floor once their spirit took hold.
This was their ritual, so old they forgot the why, but it was okay, because for this one day of the year, the town of Mahon had amnesia.

 I could see it on their faces. The quiet men and women I'd seen everyday about town-their mundane lives- transformed into a smiling horde. I watched, dumbfounded as sober individuals stumbled through the people and horses as they sipped their Gin and Lemonades (Pomada) with one hand while attempting to lift a rearing horse with the other.

My students, as drunk on Pomada as their teachers, painted dots on their cheeks to indicate if they were taken, single, or not quite taken or single. I bore witness to the longest play. The Fiestas where the children practiced for the final act where they would eventually replace their parents. It was a cycle. I saw it in class everyday. Menorquins know their friends for their entire life. In class I hypothesized about who would eventually marry whom. I was jealous. My life, something I'm grateful for, has been unpredictable, and there was a part of me that envied this security. However, nomadic roses tend to die, and though I have thorns I haven't been known to be a flower.

Menorquins get a bad rap for being closed and leery of newcomers, but I did manage to do the impossible. I made a Menorquin friend. A teacher at my school named Kiko. I wouldn't find out that I had done the impossible until I moved across the sea to Mallorca; where their claim to fame was that they were, if only slightly, less closed to outsiders than Menorquins.

The Menorquins acted as if they knew I was leaving. Which was true. I was going to leave. I would abandon them, the way I abandoned every other place I have lived since birth. However, there was something refreshing about the Menorquin sincerity. Friendship, in Menorca, is a grave responsibility. It's serious. Not some bullshit button press, or a follow me tab. It wasn't something you could just leech onto. I learned this in my hours interviewing the high school kids about various subjects from fashion to relationships. They have expectations to and from their friends. It's a big deal.

Anyway, after a few hundred horses file through the town and into the square, the mayor of the town stands on the front steps of the town hall and toss out sacks of red wine into the crowd while they sing Volem vi, volem vi, which roughly translates into (we want wine, we want wine). Although, when it's translated you might imagine a group of twenty high school students pounding their forks on the cafeteria and shouting WE WANT WINE! I swear the song is much more poetic. Whimsical.

After the wine comes the Samba. Imagine the Samba as a cross between a high school marching band, electronic dance music (without the electronics), and the crazy dude from Prodigy directing the band with a whistle while the crowd holds him in the air on their shoulders. Anybody from Ciutadella, (the more conservative side of the island) would balk at the notion of adding anything but medieval flute music to their festivities.Now, I've never been to the Sant Joan parties in Ciutadella, but I will say, that there is magic in the way the Banda Des Migjorn Gran ends by slowing the beat of I Will Survive into a slow march. I remembered looking around and watching everyone singing in unison as they expurgated themselves of the fuss and burden the closing year had placed upon them. This mob catharsis kept them sane for the year to come.

My heart is in Menorca!

The END of the Pittsburgh/NYC trip 2017

 It's strange how one can go from total confidence to utter anxiety while soaring through the air in a titanium tube with wings. One's adventurous nature dissolves with every provocative bump the turbulence produces--images of the sky pouring into the fuselage around you as the plane rips to shreds and the blue ocean becomes visible beneath your feet as you suddenly realize that your body is at terminal velocity and the only thing you can relish in is the fact that if Usain Bolt were also on this flight you might finally be able to tie him in some kid of a race. I also think about how annoying it would be to die in the cold waters of the Atlantic; not the fact that if I had managed to survive the fall in the first place, considering that hopeful (and naive) belief that somehow my heart would stop working in mid air because my body knows I'm about to die and wants to spare me the suffering, that I would be floating above countless carnivorous creatures that wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a surfer and seal. Being rent to shreds by a pod of orcas or a gam of sharks sounds romantic, when you hold it next to the thought of freezing to death in the ocean after falling out of the sky. Just think about Titanic. They had to add romance to Jack's death scene to make you ignore the fact that there was enough space for both of them to survive on the plank of  wood, and especially the fact that Jack may have struggled a little more to survive than he did even if he loved this woman society would never allow him to marry. Imagine the other lonely saps on the Titanic who didn't have a giant plank of wood to rest on, or an aristocratic lover to send them down into the abyss.

I'm not afraid of flying, the images listed above popped into my head while I was flying because I disagree with the way we portray death. There's this false narrative about the way we die. I've been around death and dying for about fifteen years now, (if you add up the time I spent in the fire department in El Paso and my subsequent years in nursing) to realize that we just don't die that way. You don't get shot in the belly and die instantly. You don't fall out of plane and die of shock. I men what the hell is this shock thing anyway? (I don't mean the shock we refer to in the medical community I mean the one we see in movies were there's an uninjured person sitting on the back of an ambulance staring off into the distance with a blanket wrapped around them, rocking back and forth)  We die because our brain stops getting the nutrients it requires, in the form of glucose and oxygen. So if you get shot in the heart, the heart doesn't work, then there's no blood flow to the brain, the brain tissue dies, and when enough of it dies, kaput! What does this mean? It means that unless you get shot in the brain stem there is no instant death. In theory, the only credible portrayals of death are those seen on the Walking Dead when the living characters kill the undead ones. SURPRISE they're already dead! This isn't a rant on the evils of T.V.  It would suck to watch people die over long realistic periods of time, so for the sake of cinema i'll suspend my disbelief. I'm only referencing this now so that you can understand my state of mind. Recently I have started to imagine what that moment would be like. That precise second when you're not drugged up on morphine or juiced up on adrenaline, and your body can do nothing more than fail at trying to survive.

Bear with me, por favor. I know this is morbid. I'm at a Starbucks. That's morbid too. At a Starbucks in Barcelona. I'm ashamed to admit it, but it's the only place, that is empty enough for me to hide in without being harassed for not buying anything more than a coffee. I just got back from my Pittsburgh/NYC trip. The topic stems from there. I have a friend who's terminally ill. Terminally ill with a disease that has completely limited his ability to enjoy life in any way that he deems meaningful. He has little to no intestine and is unable to absorb nutrients and is TPN dependent.(he gets his food through an IV). This is also coupled with severe, chronic pain. He has been ill as long as I have known him, and he is going to die next month. I went to see him. I said my piece to him, and now it's time for me to come back to reality, with the understanding that the tearful goodbye at the top of his stairs will be the last time I see him alive.I'd describe it as a proactive death. He knows, and because of this he can tell others, and day goodbye.

The first of my friends is about to die. Morrissey, and the ill-fated Hector come to mind.

After a flight from Mallorca to JFK, and a bus ride from New York to Pittsburgh There was no pretense. No façade. He was the same, eloquent person I had met ten years ago. The paragon of Sri Lankan refinement, only much thinner.  I found him having his morning tea, I grabbed myself a cup and took a seat. He chided me within a few minutes of the start of our conversation. It was not for abandoning him these long years over the ensuing shame that stemmed from my divorce, but it seemed to come from a deep sense of compassion. He was worried about me, about the unknowns of my future.

"Jorge, you have to learn how to compromise. Learn, before you become too set in your ways. Learn before you get too old. Learn before something, like a kid, forces you against your will to make a compromise" He went on to say that it was easy for me to uproot myself whenever I didn't want to give in to someone else. He said, "You're handsome, charming, and intelligent." (I'm not making this up I swear) "These things are your weakness. It's easy for you to start over because people are receptive to you, but what would happen if you were met with a situation you could not escape? What then?"

So how does one compromise? A compromise, assuming there are two or more parties who have to decided what to do, is deciding to do something that pleases all involved, or displeases all parties equally when their options are incompatible. The ideal compromise is the one that pleases everyone involved.Win win. Now considering this, how do we take into consideration the unbridled pursuit of our dreams? Because that's like totally the meaning of life, right? The truth is I don't know. Sorry. There's no wisdom to be bestowed, I'm only writing about this because it was something that he told me, and it made me slightly uncomfortable; I knew, for that reason, that there had to be truth to it. Besides if  I was able to answer the question in my first blog post, it would be like the character in a horror film deciding to lock the basement door, and call the cops, instead of walking down the stairs to see where that eager groaning and metallic scrapping sound were coming from.

In truth I imagine the answer is balance. It's always balance. You have to know when to compromise, and when not. I can figure neither out.

I would say that the most difficult part of my stay with him was watching his friends and family come spend a day or two in his company, and then say goodbye: cousins, aunts, nieces, and godchildren. It was difficult because I knew that I too, would have to say goodbye. Even if I had decided to stay until the very end. I watched as they took all of their grief and emotion, translated it into a conversation about the inner workings of their daily lives, and poured it all out until he had heard the very last drop. He's a great listener, and for that reason it's almost impossible to learn anything about him. I imagine that the visitors arrived, as I did, with the intention of listening, but in the end found themselves recounting their lives.

He always tricks you into speaking. I had to force myself to not fill the silence with my stupid babbling, because I knew that I would only be able to see and hear him for the next few days. I would hear myself, unfortunately, until the day of my death, seeing as there's no way to escape the sound of my internal narrator. I'm glad I listened. He told me about a place in Sri Lanka, an opening in mountains, a nook that looked like the Scottish moors, where he had gone as kid to camp. It was the time that he learned, after their guide made a wrong turn and found himself in front of an entire herd of water buffalo, that the most dangerous animals on the island weren't the leopards. That night they slept in an enclosed courtyard to protect themselves from the leopards and the elephants. The thing that he remembered most was the way the elephants reached into the courtyard with their trunks and pried about. "I remember reaching up and feeling the warmth of their breath on my hand." He said to me one night while we looked through his yearbook. The faces of the boys from his old school hiding among the dense foliage must have triggered his memory, but I was glad he shared it with me.

Before leaving for my trip I was worried about what the holiday itself would be like. Spending two weeks with your terminally ill friend doesn't sound like it would be on anybodies top five plans for the new year. It sounds painful. When I received the message from him telling me he had set a date to enter hospice I decided to go. I knew I had to go. I understood and supported his decision. I mean how many people are able to both end their suffering and yet bring about a sense of closure? The sheer unpredictability of death makes it impossible. When you're unsure about the date of your death, you're willing to part with precious time, to waste it might be the better way to say it. We wantonly give hours and even years of our lives to persons, places, careers, and things that make us miserable. It is only when death rears its head that we can recognize that the days of our lives are a currency that can be cashed and never deposited.

I'm grateful that he was able to spend a bit of his time on me.