Home again, Home again, jiggity jig

well, here it is... coming down to the final week here in Bolivia. 03 DEC I'll be back in Boston. Woah! It seems like such a different world. Getting a bit anxious, but I'm not worrying about it too much. I guess that's where compartmentalization comes in handy. I'm more worried that there won't be enought turkey on thanksgiving... more on that later. It occurred to me the other day that perhaps my tempermental affinity toward intense/extreme sports could be somewhat correlated to how I was raised... largely to blame would be what I saw/heard about my father doing while I was growing up... including, but not limited to the following: 1) Rollerblading down Mt. Vesuvius, an active and very steep volcano in Italy with his buddy Bob with nothing but helmets and hockey sticks. right. 2) Crashing off a cliff while mountain biking in Puerto Rico 3) Skiing faster than is in any way reasonable 4) Doing double-daffys off huge jumps 5) Earning the nickname/callsign "FLASH" while playing soccer... 6) Building me a 2 story tree fort with a Tarzan swing off the top (actually, I think my mom did that while he was on deployment to some random country... lets blame my mom too) 7) SCUBA diving with my mother (yup. blame mom also.) 8) Being a Naval Flight Officer and general badass leader 9) Generally not putting up with shit, like people cutting lines at the ski lift (once, he popped the skis off some a-hole who was trying to cut everyone. nice!) 10) Doin gainers off diving boards 11) Doing backflips on trampolines 12)... and both my parents for teaching me how to do everything, like soccer, baseball, tennis, volleyball, swimming, bike riding (well, that didn't take much teaching really. I kinda just rode off...), throwing disc (blame uncles Andy and Mike for that also), and doin work like it's my job. oh and wrestling. So I'm more or less "supposed to" have a going away party... but I don't really feel like it. The Maryknoll Fathers, brothers, sisters, lay missioners, and we few short term volunteers are going to have a thanksgiving dinner on Tuesday, so I figure I'll just say my goodbyes then and call it good. I'm pretty worried that there won't be enough turkey. Apparently there will be 2 turkeys for 30-40 people. I eat a lot of turkey. and I'm also concerned about the stuffing and cranberry sauce situation... not sure if there will be either of those in attendance. Egad. There's a cultural difference I have not yet overcome... distinct lack of cranberry sauce to go with Turkey! whatever shall I do? haha. So I went down the road of a thousand speed bumps today... called "Siglo XX" on maps. It's got about 25 speed bumps in less than a mile. It's more than aggravating. Also encountered the strange Bolivian child's lack of ability to creatively or critically think. Jason tried to get the kids to write about what animal they would be if they could be an animal and what they would do... as usual, the pages were decorated impeccably and had basically Illuminated texts containing... nothing but the title and writing prompt. Missing the point entirely. One kid wrote the plot for Confu (Kung-Fu) Panda in about 20 words and decided to be done. Almost creative! Well they're getting there anyways. se la vi, supongo. 239 hours? wow.

Get some tea and take a seat... it'll take a while

That's more or less the best way to avoid frustration in Bolivia due to timetables. Ah well, that's cultural idiosyncracies for ya. Every once in a while, I have to look in a mirror, just to make sure I’m still here. I read an article by F.W. Schumacher about te use of intermediate technologies… but it really digressed into a polemic and overview against the materialism and ridiculous over-consumerism and frivolous, foolish, and feckless needless over-exploitation of natural and human resources. It was awesome. Google F.W. Schumacher. He’s the man. So I talked to my good buddy Shea Quinn the other day. Ok, it was on facebook, but anyway. I think we’re similar in many ways. He wants to go to flight school and do 20 yrs in the Coast Guard and then be a heli-ski pilot. Which is sweet. I wrote about the same thing a bunch of times. But like I wrote recently in my journal, I’m afraid of being 42… and planning for anything when I’m 42 scares me. 40 yr old guys are slow and fat and boring and… well Andy Flanagan is 39, and he’s wicked gnarly. He’s like 4 std dev’s above being slow and fat and boring. And Steve is 30 and … well he’s a insano parachuting Green Beret of gnarliness. So maybe I just have to suck it p and stop being all wigged out about being 42 and just know that ME, being who I am, will do what I want and think is good despite the norm… like I always do. Like getting into tri’s and climbing and being a missionary. “Normal” people don’t do that kind of stuff, but I reach out for what I want and do it. Maybe I’m afraid of committing long term to things because it forces me to accept that there IS a long-term… to accept t reality of growing old and DYING. I’m afraid to think of my life as a whole because it is therefore finite… and I’m afraid to think of my life and judge it as not valuable. I’m afraid of knowing that I am mortal and finite. It’s like watching a tragedy and you already know how it ends. More or less. Why do I respect a soldier more than a doctor? Because the greatest gift, sacrifice, and love that can be given is one’s own life. Doctors’ lives are rarely at risk directly due to their treatment of patients… So what has happened since my last update? I don’t know… it was a while ago. Been doing lots of reading and have discovered contemplation, largely due to Thomas Merton’s “New Seeds of Contemplation”. As I told my buddy Noah the other day, I’m finding myself more politically liberal than conservative lately, probably due to the large volume of subversive literature I come across in Bolivia. That said, I still am neither Republican nor Democrat. I think both sides are largely comprised of ideologically inbred morons. Politicians are- almost without exception- timid, self-serving materialistic bastards. Nobody marches to the beat of their own drum. And why the fuck not? Well pragmatically speaking, it would probably be harder to get elected, and we all know that politicians abhor working hard almost as much as the idea of the middle class. Egad. Commoners. Working hard… how poor! )@_U*#_$*. Anyways, I guess that’s a bit of a rant. I just get really ticked off hearing all the bullshit that goes on behind the scenes… examples: The former chief lobbyist for the beef industry is now the head of the Dept of Agriculture. Former CEO’s of really *!&@#$ selfish and greedy agricultural super-farm-factories now occupy almost all of the FDA and DoA head positions. Damn that really makes me want to punch people. And for a while, we (USA) wouldn’t get involved in Honduras because… why? Because the #@<%-ing Clintons are really good buddies with some big industry honcho who happens to have a vested interest in Michelletti being president. Go eff yourself, Hillary. With a wad of cash, if you want, but go eff yourself! (another instance where the use of obscene language is rationally suited.) (Side note: Hooray for Honduras almost being back to normal!) I went on an adventure to climb Cerro Tunari. Somehow I was misdirected by at least 3 taxi drivers (curses) and ended up past Colcapirhua in somewhere north of Quillacollo, which is to say on a foothill of some mountain adjacent-ish to Tunari. Anyway, my goal wasn’t really to summit Tunari, although that would’ve been nice. I went out to search for God in the mountains. If somebody had asked me, I would’ve told ‘em that I was looking for the Apu’s, or Incan mountain gods… I guess I was searching for the presence of God… who I think is found most often in communing with others. Anyways, I ended up very hot, tired, and thirsty after about 7 hours of hiking up mountainside that was so steep I could stand up straight, reach out my arm, and touch the ground. Which is ridiculous btw. The hillsides occasionally slough off under their own weight and preposterous steepness. There was evidence of this in lots of loose terrain. So I very eventually found a farm, which is an incongruous location at best for farming and an adjoining road and thankfully started down. A farm girl came around the corner of the road and asked me (in Spanish) “What do you want here?” which I thought was a strangely biblical way of saying “What the heck are you doing way up here near our farm you crazy gringo?” … anyways, I thought it must’ve been fairly obvious that I was more or less lost given the way I had been meandering lackadaisically across the barren ground (significant lack of water begets lackadaisical walking/stumbling), so I told her I was hiking and got lost (barely refraining from suffixing a “DUH!” at the end of my sentence), and she said, “You’re lost” … which challenged my courtesy even more, but I simply said, “yeah, lost”. So then I asked here where this road went, (perhaps to a town?), to which she replied that she didn’t know. So I wisely said, “What? You don’t know where this road goes?!?” (she probably wanted to say DUH at this point too). No… she did not have any idea where the road went. Well that was enough. I started down the hill anxiously… who doesn’t know where the only freakin road to their nonsensically high and removed farm goes? Answer: Somebody who has never been down it. Yikes. [Cue “Deliverance” music]. So that gave me a lot to think about. I would have been much less surprised that she didn’t know where the road went if she spoke Quechua, but she was fluent in Spanish as far as I could tell. There are many places in the campo (read: “countryside” = not anywhere remotely close to a city or sizeable town) where the women speak almost exclusively Quechua because that’s the natural language in the area, and only the men speak Spanish because they need to be able to communicate with others when they go into the city to sell their goods. Hm… so that was a bit out of the ordinary. I went over to K’ara K’ara (Quechua for “A lot of trash”) last week. It’s the barrio across the street that’s built around the city trash dump. Which is an environmental nightmare. But people make their living pickin stuff out of it regardless. I met my friend from the Maryknoll language institute, Moises, there. I was gonna coach soccer or something, but I ended up refereeing games. Which worked out fine and I didn’t really mind, except that I got substantially sunburned. People of nearly every religious persuasion take some perverse pleasure in bombastically proselytizing about the nefarious delinquency of the human condition and all pleasure while dogmatically forgetting that God said the world and everything in it is good. They unknowingly- for they would be pharasaically appalled if they were aware- tell the almighty Lover that He is wrong… wine, women, and joy are primordially immoral. Well, Jesus decided that the first miracle He would use to assert His status as the Messiah God-Man was to have mercy on a party that ran out of wine and defy physics by transforming water into the best wine anybody ever had. And a long time before that, the Omnipotent Creator of the universe took time out of his significantly busy schedule to make living woman out of dust. First of all, I can’t even make a worm out of play-doh… and God makes beautiful, awesome, sexy, sensitive WOMAN out of dirt. And probably water too, cause girls have some squishy parts. Secondly, After making everything in the universe, God has all these mad stuff-makin stills and what does he make? Woman. Yahtzee! And having summarily addressed wine and women, for my third point, I shall simply inquire: how can joy and happiness be morally corrupt? That notion is just erroneous on all accounts. Go jump in a lake, Puritans. “There is no evil in anything created by God, nor can anything of His become an obstacle to our union with Him. The obstacle is in our ‘self. … Those who try to escape from this situation by treating the good things of God as if they were evils are only confirming themselves in a terrible illusion. They are like Adam blaming Eve, and Eve blaming the serpent in Eden. Woman has tempted me. Wine has tempted me. Food has tempted me. Woman is pernicious, wine is poison, food is death. I must hate and revile them. By hating them I will please God… these are the thoughts and attitudes of a baby, of a savage, and of an idolater who seeks by magic incantations and spells to protect his egotistic self and placate the insatiable little self in his own heart. To take such an idol for God is the worst kind of self-deception. It turns a man into a fanatic no longer capable of sustained contact with the truth, no longer capable of genuine love. In trying to believe in their egos as something ‘holy,’ these fanatics look upon everything else as ‘unholy’.” – Thomas Merton “The saint judges no man’s sin because he does not know sin. He knows the mercy of God. He knows that his own mission on earth is to bring that mercy to all men.” [Those who believe in only the body suffer it as falsity and deception and the fault is of] “the person who consents to the illusion, who finds security in self-deception and will not answer the secret voice of God calling him to take a risk and venture by faith outside the reassuring and protective limits of his five senses.” “Being someone you are not…[is] saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city?” “One of the first signs of a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him. In fact, they are not sure whether he is crazy of only proud…” “It is not that someone else is preventing you from living happily; you yourself do not know what you want. Rather than admit this, you pretend that someone is keeping you from exercising your liberty. Who is this? It is yourself!” “So instead of loving what you think is peace, love others and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are warmakers, hate the appatites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed- but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” “For a humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God, before whom no other power has any meaning and for Whom there is no such thing as an obstacle. Humility is the surest sign of strength.” “Blinded by a desire for ceaseless motion, for a constant sense of achievement, famished with a crude hunger for results, for visible and tangible success, they work themselves into a state in which they cannot believe that they are pleasing God unless they are busy with a dozen jobs at the same time.” [Perhaps] “all that God asks of tem is to be quiet and keep themselves at peace, attentive to the secret work He is beginning in their souls.” “But there are others who, no matter how much they suffer perplexity and uneasiness in the wilderness where God begins to lead them, still feel drawn farther and farther into the wasteland. They cannot think, they cannot meditate; their imagination tortures them with everything they do not want to see; their prayer life is without light and without pleasure and without any feeling of devotion. On the other hand they sense, by a kind of instinct, that peace lies in the heart of this darkness. Something prompts them to keep still, to trust in God, to be quiet and listen for his voice; to be patient and not to get excited. Soon they discover that all useless attempts to meditate only upset and disturb them; but at the same time when they stay quiet in the muteness of naked truth, resting in a simple and open-eyed awareness, attentive to the darkness which baffles them, a subtle and indefinable peace begins to seep into their souls and occupies them with a deep and inexplicable satisfaction. This satisfaction is tenuous and dark, it cannot be grasped of identified. It slips out of focus and gets away. Yet it is there. What is it? It is hard to say: But one feels it is somehow summed up in ‘The will of God,’ or simply, ‘God.’” “Anyone who knows true joy is never afraid of pain because he knows that pain can serve him as another opportunity of asserting and tasting his liberty.” What of love? Love between a husband and wife… scientists say that love is a chemical imbalance in the brain. Most would believe that love is a feeling or emotion. Poets and lyricists speak of falling in love… like it is a hole that one can trip and plunge into. The depressed and heartbroken speak of love as a trap or a foolish imprudent mistake. Nearly everyone thinks of love as something that happens to you… you are passive to love. As if it were an apple falling out of a tree or a bird pooping on your head (depending on where you are on the heartbroken scale). Then there’s Disney Love™…boy that won’t really screw up a young person’s concept of love… especially little girls who are exhorted to be passive objects of conquest. The ridiculousness of the notion that being most able to kill the most things would make a man an instantly optimal spouse is just mind boggling. And almost malicious for that matter. FUCK! Then there’s Malibu-Barbie Love™…as long as you have complementarily awesome tans, bodies, and cars, you’ll be all set. Oh, and massive boobs. That’s obviously important for love too. And then there’s homosexual love… because somewhere along the line, people forgot that man and woman are incomplete without one another. (Plus rectal copulation does not yield procreation) (What’s more, it’s unsanitary). I hold that all of these notions are vacuous fallacies that can only lead to errant disillusionment and disaster, or at the very least, unfulfillment and dissatisfaction. So what is this romantic love? Is it a proverbial thought? And unattainable ideal? And ethereal shadow, vanished once viewed in the harsh light of reason? It is only for dreamers, the miraged, and the transcendent? Maybe it IS only for the chemically imbalanced! Or maybe it is a composite of consciously directed Truth. Maybe it’s a decision. Maybe love doesn’t happen to you… maybe You happen to Love. Maybe it can start with chemical imbalance that eventually balances out in the realm of maturity and true self-sacrifice. Maybe to love someone is to want what is good for them… maybe love isn’t merely a pleasurable feeling. Maybe you can love in great joy or in great pain. Maybe love is self-gift, pure and free. That’s what I think this wife-husband love is… it’s being selfish for the other. Love is being otherish. It’s laying the self down… not because the self is not valuable or worthwhile, but because picking up the ‘other’ is not possible when clinging to self and the interests of self. Well that’s enough Merton for now. Next question: Do I have emotions? I have feelings…I often chastise myself for feeling lazy. The best remedy for feeling lazy is to get stuf done. I miss my friends sometimes and my family from time to time. Is that an emotion or feeling…? What is the difference? Maybe an emotion is always involuntary while a feeling can be voluntary. I mainly rationalize unpleasant feelings/emotions, experience them momentarily, and then discard them. I guess due to their lack of value. What value does missing someone have? I guess it lets you know that they are important to you. Ok, check the box, and then move on. Emotions are almost always useless. The only useful ones I can think of are Fear, Shame, and Anger, only because they can be motivators. Hm. Maybe I’ve read too much Machiavelli… Glory through pain. If it hurts, it’s holy. If it’s early, it’s pure. If it’s cold, it’s sacred. When your body quits, your mind begins. When your body dies, your soul is born. Where your muscles fail, your spirit flexes. As your heart explodes, lungs scream, and body cries, there the living flame of transcendent humanity leaps into life, oxygenating your soul like a near-drowned wild animal. And once you know it, it’s like knowing the secret to the universe… it’s like you have entered the matrix and see the code for the first time. You feel like a monster truck in a demolition derby. You are aware for the first time that you are a sculptor standing in front of a virgin block of rock, sculpting already the curves of your life… whatever you want is in there… you just have to see it, seize it, and smash the hell out of solid stone to get at it… so you’d better be strong in body and mind.

Road of Death, Road of really significantly annoying circumstances...

So the road of death isn't happening until friday when I get back to La Paz (God willing). But I did get to go on the road of really significantly annoying circumstances. I left Cochabamba at 2200 on Sunday night. I just got to Cuzco. Granted I was planning on having a long layover in La Paz to bike the road of death, which didn't work out. So I left La Paz on the 1400 bus... so 1430 or so. I just got to Cuzco about an hour ago. its supposed to take about 12 hrs. First I paid 100 B's, or about $14 for a semi-cama bus, which is super duper comfortable. So the first bus wasn't semi-cama, but it was only going to Copacabana, about 3 hrs away. then, supposedly, we'd change over to a semi-cama (that means half-bed, btw). So the first bus broke down about 20 minutes into the trip. We were still in El Alto... which is basically the sketchy outskits of La Paz. So we waited about a half hour for another non-semi-cama bus. Went to Copa with little problems. Then had to wait an hour because the "bus" driver was screwing around with his thumb up his ass. or something like that. turns out it was a micro. which is a small van-like vehicle that has about 75% more seats than it should. but that was just going to be until the border about and hour away. then we decided to pick up lots more people, so I was sitting on a nice comfy set of bolts holding a seat to the floor. ow. so then we did the border crossing thing, which wasnt terribly bad. I had to fill out some extra forms because I now have bolivian residency... sort of. I have the official mark in my passport, but I don't actually have a residency card... so that was weird to explain. but I didn't have to pay anything, which is absolutely surprising and fantastic. Then we were supposed to get on the semi-cama bus. nope. another shitty ass little micro. that really pissed me off. but not as much as the 4 hour ride to Puno on the most poorly paved roads that could actually still be considered paved... it would've been much better if the roads weren't paved at all. but as it was, I was squashed in the back with some funny brazilians (fabian and david) getting my head smashed repeatedly against the walls as our nutso driver swerved around to "avoid" potholes. and I had to piss so bad. for about 3 of the 4 hours. and I saw a really cruel sign that said "Puno 57 km"... and about 200 km later we arrived. )(/"·$·$)/&$%$&·€. so then i waited an hour or so in the bus terminal for the "semi-cama" which I didn't really believe existed after 5 hours in micros. I was about ready to kill a llamita at this point, so it was pretty lucky that Ryan Sherman sent me the rap song he and Zach Ogden recorded... helpèd me chill out quite a bit. so I didn't kill any llamas. I did stomp on some flowers though. So then we get on the Semi-cama bus!! it existed after all! I got the front seat next to an old brazilian adventist pastor i had met on the bus from la paz. it was great. for about two hours. then we broke down. and sat there for about 6 hours cause we were in the middle of abso-freakin-lutely nowhere. I've got some pictures. It looks like the lord of the rings or something. so that was really awful because it was about 10·F. and I had given my CG-issued fleece to the old brazilian dude cause he was dumb and only brought a thin sweater. anyways, finally another bus came and it was a regular sort of bus and had too many people on it. so we rode that for about 4 hours until we got to Cuzco. thank God. about 22 hours after I had left La Paz. damn! that was an unpleasant experience. I hear SJ Otey is in Peru... maybe close by? who knows. Anyways, that's my venting about getting to Cuzco. yes, it's a lot of complaining, but its better than me losing it, I guess. So I found out I have to leave thursday AM so that I can make it across the border by 1800 to make it back to la Paz by at least 7am so I can go on the Camino de Muerte bike ride... I wanted to leave thursday evening at least. Fortunately, my buddy Jay might be able to skip work on Friday and come with... that would be sweet. If now, I'll have to play nice with all the european super-tourists. They really are super... they travel for months at a time and go all over. Pretty jealous actually. Not as jealous as I am of the assistant ornithologists I met in a cafe this morning... 3 american college-ish age kids spening 3 months in the amazon basin searching for and marking birds' nests. they each have a 1 sq km area of responsibility... so they basically just go traipsing about all day playing around in the jungle and lookin at animals. dang. maybe I can do that next summer. lol. peace, love, and all that groovy stuff folks. I'm off to meet my family. and find a functional baño. nos vemos.

long overdue and totally insufficient, but here it is...

Blog update...

So I figured nobody was reading my blog, so I stopped. Then I got angry messages calling me lazy, so here I am writing again. So what’s goin on in Bolivia? Well there’s lots of public works goin on and the school here in Nueva Vera Cruz finally got food for the year- which was supposed to be sustaining the school kids since February- so that means… elections must be coming up! Dun dun daa! Padre Pancho had been feeding about 150 kids since february out of his own pocket, so naturally he’s getting repaid by the gov’t who was supposed to be feeding the kids @ the school, right? Right. No wait, that would make sense, so WRONG. Oh, fortunately the teachers at the school have 7 months of extra food that they won’t need since the kids actually ate it all already (naturally, since half of them don’t get nearly enough food at home. Not their fault.), so they should at least give the food “back” to Padre Pancho since he pretty much spent all of his Maryknoll stipend on that. However, the bastards at the school also decided that he (we) should only get 1 bag of rice, 1 bag of corn starch, and a few half bags of other random stuff. And no noodles, btw, which really sucks. So, that in a nutshell’s why things in Bolivia are the way they are. Foolishness, stupidity, greed, etc. Only in Bolivia, can people democratically elect a known murderer and former military dictator.

Ok, there’s one good rant. What else is new… Been reading a bit of theology and philosophy, because I’ve never actually studied either of those things because apparently those aren’t important things to learn. According to the USDoE. Whatev. Been getting into a big compilation of Liberation Theology essays, speeches, documents, etc. Its interesting… I’m not sure I can write any critiques or even revealing synopses of anything therein just yet, cause it all is still so new to me… I feel like I’m just getting into algebra in the world of mathematics, so forgive me if I refrain from trying to explain anything too much… I still just know so little about the subject or even the whole field of theology. Not that I won’t ever, but I shall refrain from expounding on theology until I am less clueless. To be sure, I don’t think that the lack of accuracy I can wreak on said subjects i.e. theology etc, should preclude me from attempting… for that would be fairly Mephistophelean in the tradition of Goethe’s Faust: to think ‘It is better there should never have been anything.’ … but I will refrain for the moment.

THE WILL OF GOD

… now what the hell does that mean? Or maybe what the heaven does that mean? I’ve been told those really effed up genocidal murdering maniacs- the crusaders, that is, used the phrase to justify their ludicrous homicidal rampaging. So… that`s pretty effed up. Anyways, this phrase seems to be used primarily and ineffectively in two circumstances. The first is that extraordinarily unhelpful explanation for human suffering… Why did such and such family members die? Why are there millions of people starving to death in wherever-land? Etc etc, to which some exorbitantly wise person replies, “Well, dear, it’s God’s will. We can’t understand it on account of being humans, but there is some underlying and future reason for x and y calamities.” Well that’s bullshit. Of course there’s no God out there inflicting pain and suffering on we puny and fragile humans. We’ll get to why momentarily. The second circumstance in which “the will of God” is often invoked, a situation which I have many times found myself struggling, especially recently, deals with what one ought to do with one’s life. I figured I had to discern “God’s will”. Now the problem with that is my preconception of God. Or I suppose it’s not really a preconception… but my existing conception which has been erroneously informed (yes, I’m deferring blame. So what). Sure we all have to discern God’s will in one way or another, but -at least in my case- there’s a monumental difference between what I thought was “THE WILL OF GOD”, and what is actually the point of my life. Now I was at least on the right track… I figured the will of God was to serve fellow man. But I rankled at most of the ways I thought that could be manifested… I don’t want to be a priest or brother or doctor (especially not a dentist as my mother continuously begged.) or whatever… and since that’s not what I desire, not what’s in my heart, I didn’t want to do it. And I felt somewhat selfish about it. But thinking about those options I thought “Man, that sounds boring as heck… especially the dentist part!!!”

So what do I think the will of God is in my life? And why do I tell you that there is no God out there inflicting suffering on the world? Understanding God as AGAPE… Because God is pure, complete self-gift. God is agape. God is the love between and in humans. Here’s an interesting fact… nowhere in the new testament are the criteria for “last judgement” described except in Mattthew 25:31-46 (go look it up). And guess what… it doesn’t say you have to go to church or sing in the choir or look really pious or not cuss or write nice christmas cards to everyone you know or wear clean underwear. (Note: I am not stating that those things are good or bad. Just commenting.) It just indicates that the sheep – that’s the good guys - apparently have loved and had mercy on their fellow men by giving food and drink to the hungry and thirsty, clothing the naked, welcoming strangers, and visiting the sick and imprisoned. So for all you folks who aren’t too big on organized religions, well Catholocism, arguably the most organized religion in the world, acknowledges that love of one’s fellow man is really the only important moral question when push comes to shove.

Slight change of subject: If God is this “agape”, this complete self gift, then one ought to devote oneself to giving oneself away in the best way possible. So how is that? Should we all become philanthropic and possibly impecunious altruists letting people walk all over us in the name of “giving oneself away”? Well that sounds lame to me. I think everybody’s got their own vocation of sorts… or more than one, I suppose. For instance, I’m not called to be an artist, mostly cause I really stink at basically anything artistic. I really wish I could draw cartoons though… anyways… According to a certain theologian, Michael J Himes, there are three signs which can be investigated to evaluate whether a particular path may be a suitable vocation. They are:

1. Is the work a source of joy for you? Not happiness, but joy? Joy being “the interior conviction that what one is doing is good, even if it does not make one happy or content.” Happiness is irrelevant, as it is externally dependent and capricious. But JOY is the question here.

2. Does the ability and opportunity for growth exist in you and this work?

a. Can you? Physically, mentally, spiritually, etc etc…

b. Will this work force you to stretch yourself?

3. Is this work really a way of giving yourself away to others?

I invite any brave readers to evaluate themselves according to this sort of primitive rubric. Let me know what you think.

What else is new? Been reading a document about the tortures, disappearances, murders, gov’t executed robbery, extortion, fraud, intimidation, etc of the Banzer dictatorship in Bolivia back in the day. (mid-late 70’s I think). Its pretty messed up shit. But the other thing that bothers me is “Operation Condor”… which was US (CIA) promoted, bankrolled, and institutionalized de-stabilization of most South and Latin American countries. And what happened after said de-stabilization of societies and economies? The good old CIA helped nefarious, hateful leader rise to power. … what the fuck CIA!? Literally hundreds of thousands of people died and millions more were egregiously injured (physically and otherwise) disenfranchised, and economically crushed as a fairly direct result of these actions. (PS- this is the sort of thing cussing was really meant for. So don’t anyone annoy me about that.) Damn it. I have nothing more to write about that at this moment. Except that I hope everyone likes their cheap petroleum products. And as a friend of the US Armed Forces, I feel pissed off that maybe our brave men and women aren’t dying to protect freedom and American capitalistic democracy… maybe they’re just dying to protect the investments and property of the wealthy.

Maybe all this being in Bolivia… seeing poverty… learning the truth about things I never knew happened, cause nobody taught me (my fault maybe?) is making me rail against the institutionalized marginalization of people. Institutions will always be flawed, yes, but I cannot simply accept the suffering of the poor the way it is now. And Bolivia isn’t even that poor. And yes, I know Bolivia is extremely remote from the USA. But it’s still part of this same…structure/system/institution/social order of the world. Or whatever you want to call it.

Differences between Bolivia and the USA…

· People walk a lot in Bolivia

· Accordingly, there are people out and about all the time. Walk through a US suburb and tell me what you see. Cars and houses, not people.

· Dust. Unless you’re from some really arid part of the US. And then it’s more likely to be sand than super-fine dust.

· Dogs… holy cow there’s a lot of dogs in Bolivia. And some of the stray dogs aren’t really stray. They just get kicked out of their houses during the day. And some just hang around informally with a family or whatever. It’s pretty casual. And almost none have collars (even the non-street dogs).

· Honesty… there’s a lot of corruption in the government. What’s the same though, is there’s lots of stupid rules that don’t make any sense.

· Prisons… if you can pay, you get to stay in a nice prison. Like really nice. Like better than any hotel I’ve ever been in. If not, stick your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye, cause mideival dungeons look more welcoming than these places.

· Getting out of the way… no concept whatsoever. I was carrying some 50kg bags of food for the school, and the kids really didn’t get it that I might drop a bag 4x their own bodyweight on their head if they didn’t move. So I thought it was just kids being kids. And then I was moving large quantities of gravel… older kids didn’t get it either. So I figured it might be kids being stupid kids. Then I was trying to move a wheelbarrow loaded with a couple of those food bags… and the dang teachers wouldn’t move out of the way either. They just stood in the middle of this skinny hallway I was trying to go down talking. So I was like “hey… can I get by??” and they moved over to the side… of a 4 ft wide hallway while a guy (me) with a 3.5 ft wide wheelbarrow with huge bags hanging over the sides tries to get by. (*&#@$&^%. But apparently that’s a culture thing. Whatever. It’s still really freakin annoying.

· Water… don’t drink it unless it’s boiled.

· Beer… it’s not good. Except Taquina Ice. For some odd reason. It’s not even expensive or anything.

· Exercise… ow. For some reason anaerobic activity absolutely destroys me. I did mountain climbers… and nearly died. Seriously. Running is pretty bad too, but not nearly as bad as sprinting. Why is that? Shouldn’t it be the other way around if anaerobic activity uses no oxygen? (seriously… anybody know why?)

· Trees… there aren’t. Ok, well there’s a lot of trees in the rainforests, but those are far away. In Cochabamba, there’s about a 1:100 ratio of trees to people. In Maine, it’s like 10,000,000,:1. Hah.

· Casas Anticreditos… this makes little sense to me. You can live in a house rent free with a sizeable down payment (maybe US$5000 for a decent house) for maybe 5 years, after which you get all your $$ back. ? That’s a pretty long life-cycle for making a profit… So you build a house which you aren’t going to live in for like what… maybe US$50,000…. You get $5000 for 5 years to do what with? Invest? So you make $2000, and that’s being real generous… it’ll take you 25 cycles of 5 years to regain your principal… that’s 125 years. … wtf, mate?

· Water trucks… that leak. A lot. So I understand that there isn’t infrastructure to bring water to the poor, unimportant people out here in the Zona Sur, cause nobody cares about them in the gov’t. So they have water trucks that bring water and fill up everyone’s old oil drums to use for… anything they need water for. But why the hell do all of the trucks leak terribly? There isn’t any shortage of metal or welding material… so do the water truck companies just not care that their trucks are leaking their product everywhere? You can always figure out where the water trucks are for two reasons. 1) They incessantly blare their damn loud airhorns. At 5 in the morning when they come around. 2) You can follow the ridiculous water trails down the cobblestone roads. But only for about 3 minutes, cause it takes about that long for the insano sun to scorch the rocks back to their normal humidity forsaken state.

· Sun… it feels about 3x stronger here in Bolivia. Whether it’s being closer to the equator or being at almost 3000m or the atmosphere is just being a bitch right now… it takes about 1 minute of direct sun exposure before you feel like a sun dried raisin. And the air feels like that too. And the ground feels like that. It’s kindof like being inside of a kiln, I imagine. Dust, dry air, fire-like rays cooking you like a convection oven.

· English… everyone says they want to learn, but nobody is determined enough to do it. Except for the kids who have to study it in school. Oh well.

· MICHAEL JACKSON. What the heck? He’s a major deity down here…. ? what gives? Doesn’t anybody realize he was really, really creepy and sketchy?? I don’t care if he sold a billion records… he touched kids people!! And he completely and cruelly rejected his particular melanin concentration with a big middle finger to all of the black people of the world. And then told God to eff off too by completely redesigning his face. And he didn’t even look good after all that. He looked like an malnourished albino bat with a serious case of hepatitis. Sorry he died, btw. But seriously.

· Breasts… have no sexual significance in Quechua or Aymara culture. But thighs do. Like don’t wear shorts above your knees or you’re flashing everyone. Weird? Maybe we’re the weird ones. That makes more sense if you think about it. There’s enough western influence, however, that there are some rather scandalous women wearing short skirts/shorts around.

· Urinating/Excreting. Totally normal and natural life functions. So why hide it? Actually, the women have it better. Their big skirts can hide anything… so just give a half a whirl and pop a squat. Dudes just piss wherever. No big deal. Like on the street in the middle of the city.

· Seasons. Make no sense at all. I just sat outside in the sun wearing only shorts and felt like I was inside of an oven. Or at least how I imagine the inside of an oven would feel. And It’s still winter! It’s dry and hot… in the winter. It starts to rain here in Nov, and will be soggy until maybe april or may. But not hot. Which makes sense, cause that’s the summer season. What the heck…

Well… I’m tired of writing now. Ask me about my birthday. I’ll write about that later.

And a quoted paragraph…

“There are as many reasons not to serve others, not to act for justice, not to assist those who suffer, not to defend the oppressed, as there are reasons to do so. We may not act because of insecurity about our own value and ability, and so we worry that we cannot do anyting effectively. We may not act because of a placidity which is thinly separated from sloth or becasuse of a selfishness that is damnably close to malice. But sometimes- I am inclined to think many times- we do not act because we cannot imagine what to do.”

^stick that in your pipe and smoke it…

So I decided that I want to be … revolutionary. That I want to be nonconformist. I don’t want to be socially contrarian though… that’s just pointlessly annoying. So I do not want to go out and do weird things just for the sake of doing weird things or for attention… but I want to do what I want to do, regardless of what social customs dictate regarding the subject. Which is sometimes actually hard to imagine… just because I know I’m already so conditioned by … previous experiences. On another note, that’s why I don’t think all you old(er) folks should necessarily write of young people as fools… yes I would agree that most young people are not really with it…but I also contend that perhaps inexperience can sometimes be linked with a lack of bias, a lack of negative experience, a lack of prejuidice, cynicism, and pessimism. So if I feel like wearing different clothes or living in a different kind of house or living a different kind of life, one not in an infernally sterile and unimaginative suburb nor in an apartment nor in a mansion… I will. It’ll be a Rytopia. Or a Bro-ranch. Or maybe it’ll be a self-designed commune. Or maybe the first nudist colony above the arctic circle… But I won’t do it just to be contrarian.

Going to Santa Cruz tomorrow

We´re going to the Jesuit missions northeast of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. It´s supposed to be a pretty awesome trip. We should be going through Concepcion and then east to some other Jesuit missions to the Chiquitano peoples. The Jesuits did a lot of awesome work with the indigenous Chiquitano people... apparently its one of the best historical instances of large-scale evangelization in history. But then the portugese wanted to enslave the natives, so they chased the Jesuits and/or Spanish out... ya pues. I'm kinda jealous of Kinsy and Sophie... they're going up to La Paz on the overnight bus tonight and are going to bike down the "Death Road" ... where 1 in 4 busses falls off a cliff and explodes in a fiery crash. Sweet. Kinsy is also going up to the "Beni" or Beni river area in the NW of Bolivia (Toward Brasil) ... which is where Padre Pancho used to do his missionary work... all up and down the Beni River. Until he got chased into hiding by the Banzer gov't. At least I think it was Banzer... no se. Anyways, she's tryingto get me to go up there with her... which would be sweet... swimming with pink river dolphins, spearfishing, sleeping in hammocks in palm-leaf roof huts. gnarly. But I might be going to La Paz already that wknd? no se... vamos a ver. Paz y Amor