I'm finally beginning to feel like myself again after the viral month of October. I was beginning to lose interest in almost everything except sleeping.

Now that I'm back on top, I've managed to get a handle, or at very least a perceived handle, on work. I finally managed to teach a few decent lessons and also managed to get The Man off my back. We all have The Man in our lives, that incessant obligation that complicates our lives and spoils all our fun. When you're paying - or the corporation that employs you - close to $20,000 USD to educate your child, you're looking for something resembling a quarterly report to the shareholders, especially when you have notions of Yale and Skull and Bones and the White House in mind for your spawn. We had parent-teacher interviews last Tuesday and The Man wasn't nearly as punishing as I thought, confirming my life-long held belief that if you're worried about doing a good job, you're doing a good job. The Man can be just about anything: your boss, your mortgage, your spouse/partner, your stomach or your golf game.

I'm not clear on the genesis of The Man, but I would guess it was the early 1950s. I've been reading a fair amount recently as I didn't have energy for much else. I've followed my tendency for threads, threads that tie and bind, or either get knotted up when you pull them or unravel the fabric of existence. I'm self-schooling myself in American post-modern literature. It was the logical stop after ready quest and odyssey for four years. Semiotics is what I think I'm talking about, symbols that point to things, that allow us to name things. Somewhere in a pile of gmail is the name of a text book I need to read on the subject. My understanding is this, if semiotics applies to questing, then the "The Hero's Journey" (I'm almost embarrassed to utter the phrase) points to or suggests answers, a goal or an outcome. Post-modernism points to another question and things defy labels. This is confusing. In 2004, I thought I knew where I was headed and all I encountered just affirmed that feeling. Now, I know that I'm still headed in the same direction, but everything points away from the appointed journey, the excluded middle. Like an Escher painting, the background implies what is in the foreground. My first clue that I had entered this phase of life was The Crying of Lot 49 and now I think I've found the font of that work, Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. It's a groovy little book and I highly recommend it. Anyhow, I'm starting to understand the point of Finnegan's Wake, though I make no claims to understand it...yet.

Realizing that it would be criminal to sequester myself to my apartment on weekends for the next two years. I have a duty to you, my reader, to get out and explore this wacky place. On Sunday, I finally ventured forth to Hösök Tere or Heroes Square to grab a coffee and walk around the city park, reconnoiter the thermal baths and the museums that await. I really wanted to take my camera, but I forgot. I realize I need some non-work related ritual in my life, so I will head back to the coffee shop on Sunday and take some photos this time. I will resurrect this travel blog, I will win you all back.

With the internet providing all the information we need through a little, tiny fiber-optic cable, I don't really see the point in links, except for this one. Who the hell thought to check whether Scotch tape emitted X-rays? I can see some senior scientist at 3M, hunkered down in a dark room on Christmas Eve, stripping off great lengths of the new-fangled adhesive and making a note to investigate the sparks after he finished wrapping his wife's brand new vacuum cleaner. Has anyone ever tried stripping off tape in a pitch black room? Well, it gives off enough radiation to X-ray your hand!!! Fear not: the air prevents most of the photons from reaching your hand. Still, this is a damn strange phenomenon. Next, I suppose dental floss will be found to fuse hydrogen atoms.

There I stop. I need to ease myself back into this. I'm still a little at odds with writing. Try wrapping this years gifts in the dark but wear a lead bib.

P.S. thank you reader, whoever you are, for completing the poll

I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up

Hi friends: It's a little discouraging for me to face up to an entire month, October, without writing anything. As some of you have suspected, work has been beating me down some. And the isolation of living somewhere new. I've also been struggling with a virus, it seems like almost a month now, that has dampened my enthusiasm for everything except sleeping. The saying goes "you can't keep a good man down" and as my life's ambition is to have "good man" as an epitaph, I'd better get up. Thanks to you for giving me a poke to see that I was still breathing.

It would be too self-indulgent to blather on here about my U.S. Election angst, we all have it and for similar reasons, even if some of us view the next leader of the world from opposite sidelines. Be it enough to say, any change at this point has to be positive. I'm not sure this blog is the place for political rants: there's plenty of cyberspace elsewhere to host that. I think the "success" of this blog, if I can be that self-indulgent has been in the "what I got up to today" spirit of it. So, in that spirit, I will continue, though perhaps without so many links.

Pictured above is me/myself/I and my brother-in-law at Kleine Scheidigg in Switzerland, photo courtesy of my dear sister who takes very good photos of the two of us. As I discovered from Forensics - one of the many courses I have been cajoled into teaching or compelled to teach at AISB as part of my self-styled financial freedom package - I will not name names. Once a student told me the names of my nieces and nephews and my maternal great-great grandmother, I thought it best to refrain from names of family and friends.

I'll let the picture tell its tale: it was a great day and I would visit this place again and I was very happy to share the experience with my family.

The trip to Switzerland was undertaken by rail from Budapest. It was an overnight train and, yes, "Night Train" was resonating through my brain whilst I rode, which may explain why I couldn't sleep better. That and the virus. The coach consisted of several six passenger compartments, lining one side of the car, with six seats within, three facing three. The seats fold down to accommodate the six passengers in bunks. Fortunately, there was only one other passenger in my compartment and they did not snore. It was a surprisingly pleasant way to travel. The main train stations in Budapest are all very close to my apartment, perhaps less than six tram/tube stops, so rail is darn handy and responsible.

Speaking of responsibility, I think the ecological/environmental Armageddonism is getting to me. Please, refrain from sending me anything illuminating this issue further. I've thought about it, which is why I stopped driving a car four years ago and if I can find a way to get to Europe by boat and rail without spending all of the money I'm saving (see above), I'll do it. Frankly, the world just isn't set up for non-air travel between continents. When all those Brits traveled to Australia on P&O in the sixties, were they mortgaging their lives to do so? Maybe. I know the planet and all life on it is screwed, I just don't need any reminders, at least not now. Remind me after I'm over this virus. I suppose the viruses will survive.

I best not push myself too hard, it's 12:30 am, with no election results in sight and I can never be sure that I'm feeling 100% these days, so I'm turning in. I will try to pull it together and get back to blogging. In the meantimes, walk or take a bus, pass on the New Zealand lamb or the apples from Chile; wash your hands regularly and cover your mouth when you sneeze.

Ken

Why We Eat Stinky Food

Work has been killing my enthusiasm for writing.

Outward Bound Camp, somewhere in Czech

I was told to bring a lunch for the bus because it was going to take five hours to get to the camp. We were headed in the vicinity of Brno, a city of approximately 300,000 in the south eastern half of Czech. I'm choosing to call the country Czech, for the same reason I call Canada "Canada" and not "The Dominion of..." Unlike the name Canada, which implies the supremacy of Upper and Lower Canada in the confederation of my beloved country, the name Czech favors neither the Bohemians, Moravians nor the Silesians. Forget Belgium as a precedent for the dissolution of Canada, "The Velvet Divorce" of 1993 was a bloodless, and, by all accounts, amicable schism: Slovakia achieved self-determination and Czech kept the flag. I'm not advocating dissolution of the Dominion, but we might as well have it on the table during the upcoming election. With just under 10,000,000 sq km we've got a long way to go before we Balkanize the Great White North. Somewhere between 500 to 1000 Slovenias, Montenegros or Kosovos could fit into Canada. In fact, only PEI comes even close to Balkan stature as far as land mass is concerned. And we should let them keep the bridge. But seriously, Canada, with nearly 50% of its citizenry claiming neither British, French nor indigenous ancestry, seems to lack the nationalistic inertia necessary for dissolution. We'd be better fretting over the ascent of Sharia law or Eschatological Christian Literalism than separation. French Quebec and English Canada seem to be missing the direction in which Canada is headed...again.

If not for 9000 km of separation, my colleagues would have suspected my lunch had been so expertly packed by my dear mother, individual Tupperware containers filled with paprika salami, olives, cheese, cherry tomatoes and Tejföl. These foods have been the staples of my time here, that and beer from Plsen, the home of the pilsener brewing process. Whereas Magyar has a glut of vowels, Czech seems to work fine without them, thank you very much. Tejföl is a remarkable dairy concoction, coming in a variety of fat contents up to and including 20%. Being mass-challenged (some might say skinny, I prefer wiry) I opt for the full-blown 20% variety. Why I'm so taken by Tejföl is that the taste of it is ever so slightly offensive, offensive in a kimchi, Limburger cheese or durian way. Speaking personally, I've never tried any of these foods, but two of the three have been described to me, Limburger cheese as "toe-jam" and durian as a "pissy, shitty diaper". Perhaps it would carry more weight if a more liberally minded state had done so, but Singapore bans durian from its transit system. These unlikely sources of gastronomical pleasure beg the question: what's up with the obsession with stinky food? I detect a further, more expansive blog emerging, so I'll get back on topic, but think about it: you too have a stinky food that brings you delight. Let me finish this thread with the following: perhaps beyond sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umame there is a sixth flavor, skank?

As I polished off a 175 g container of Tejföl for dessert, somewhere on the road to Czech, around Brataslava, it occurred to me that I was getting a little too fond of the skanky flavor and smell and that, perhaps, even someone of my metabolism is better off without 35 g of dairy fat at the end of an otherwise "heart-smart" meal. You see, I am getting obsessed with my mortality.

In the end, I've temporarily sworn off my daily container of Tejföl, maybe permanently. I have a pretty good suspicion that it's the latter outcome. I'll miss you Tejföl. By the way, "tej" (pron. "tay") is Magyar for "milk", and though Hungarian have virtually no cognates with English, I'm confident you'll figure out the second half of Tejföl.

Viszlát

My body, my angst

Carl Jung said he didn't encounter a single patient over the age of forty that wasn't obsessed with their own mortality. My obsession with my mortality was marked by two acute attacks. The first was hiking through the back-country of Gros Morne National Park, at the premature age of 38, when I realized, statistically speaking, my life was half over. That's me above, overlooking 10 Mile Pond and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, after I realized my mortality. I know, you actuarials out there are raising a fuss because life expectancies today don't reflect my life expectancy in 2046, and each year I live increases the likelihood of my seeing another year. Right. Point conceded. By the way, there's a 25% chance that John McCain will die during his second term in office. My American cousins, please, please, ponder that factoid before casting your ballot. Okay, shoot me, I lied. Go read this, but ignore the jack-ass tone: Sam Harris formulates great arguments without having to appeal to mouth-breathing troglodytes. No, no, no, I'm not a Sam Harris fan, but he is the populist, sometimes intelligent mouthpiece of the American, non-eschatological vote. Back to the plot. To take a less pedantic view, irrespective of whether or not my life was actually half over, from the aforementioned day forward, I have been acutely aware that my life will be half over (if not already) in the immediate, foreseeable future. So, I became a teacher.

The second jolt of mortality occurred last Christmas, as I faced the holiday alone and with the words of Rabbi Harold Kirschner from a podcast of CBC's Tapestry pounding in my ears: what do you do when the dream dies? Excuse me? Perhaps Chanukah is a more self-reflective holiday than Christmas, but I'm about to celebrate the birth of the Guy who said I could have ever-lasting life, I don't need to think about what I'm going to do with my dead dream, 40 years old and suffering, heroically I might add - Odysseus heroically - through loneliness and a loss of direction. And THAT was a run-on sentence. The Rabbi picked a pretty rotten time to pull the curtain on the Wizard that was ruling my life, but there was no denying that I was staring into the gaping, pitiless maw of a full-fledged mid-life crisis. Not the buy-a-Porche-911, shag-everything-that-moves crisis, no, this was a what-will-be-the-sum-total-of-my-life moment. Armed with Man's Search for Meaning and Seasons of a Man's Life I headed into Central America in search of my God. Those of you who understand my theology, explain that last sentence to those recoiling from the G-word. I digress. It's my job to digress. What I learned is that thirty always was the new twenties and if you hadn't grown up by forty (I think Carol King put it best) then it's too late baby now, it's too late. I weathered these storms, continued to dress and look the part of an 18-34 year old, whilst occupying the noggin of a sober, forty year-old. I got a job in Budapest. I got my finances in order. I was struggling to be grown up about things, but when you hit forty and you're single, I know everyone talks behind your back about your singularity. Shame on all of you. The burning questions I had to face after staring down my mid-life demons from January to August were as follows: how short should I cut my hair and where should I buy my clothes. Hair-wise, I'm holding out. There's a teacher at the school with way longer hair than me. Clothes? Dockers just ain't working. I'm a 41 year-old stuck in an 18 year-olds body. So I ask you: what would you find more embarrassing, having a paunch and buying Dockers at Sears or having gray hair and wrinkles and having to shop where the 18 year-olds shop? I had a bit of a crisis walking around Budapest's malls, trying on clothes for my age group that fit like mumus or potato sacks. Finally, I screwed up my courage and opted for fit over looking my age. As soon as I buy some black shoes, I'll send some pictures.

The blues jam was a non-starter. I've been too damn tired to get up before 11 am on the weekends (I'm up at 6 am every weekday: hey! I was working musician since the age of 17!!!) I've been practicing, oh, probably 5 days a week and the saxophone feels good again. I'm slightly chicken-shit about going to the jam session, but mostly intent on sounding like a sax player, not a sax owner. There's a huge difference. Yes, I'm aware this blog is getting increasingly recursive. Actually, my playing hasn't felt this strong since 2003 AND I think my horn has some leaks. Usually, when you're rusty, you just THINK the horn has leaks: the horn has some leaks.

That's it. No links (well, a couple), just self-indulgent stream of consciousness. I think I'll extend last week's survey because, frankly, it was a really good posting, especially the last link. So, please vote early and often.

Next week: My Outward Bound trip to Czech

What Condition My Condition Is In

I was going to put a movie here, but embedding has been disabled, so you'll have to click here to see what I'm talking about.

Consciousness baffles me, what comes in, what doesn't, what goes out into the cosmos and what comes back. I keep waiting to receive a bill with my name written on it, currency I'm talking about, except all the currency I ever wrote my name on was paper notes in $1 and $2 denominations.

They say that all bloggers need to find their own voice. They are the seminarians(?) that led the Geist Blogging and Podcasting seminar in Vancouver this summer. That was the best $100 I ever spent. Go to this seminar, even if you only plan to read blogs, it's fantastic value. I'm going to save my family and friends the torture of anticipating my next career move: domesticity and a career in writing. I have a note to myself about it on my computer desk top, and when I do that I become a professional musician, record a CD, travel the world, become a teacher in Costa Rica and then move to Hungary. The will cannot be contained, your will, my will, a will.

My voice may be this: connecting the stuff on the perimeters of our experience to find the middle. There's some expression about the "excluded middle", I'm sure I'm quoting it out of context, but perhaps one of you could send the reference to the "comments". Here's what I'm talking about: back in my Edmonton days, when I was filling out the "chemistry teacher" portion of my resume, I picked up "The Eternal Golden Braid" from my dearly beloved Edmonton Public Library system. If I ever strike big in the literary world I will be thanking the EPL and CBC, right after the six of you, family and friends, that read this blog or have read this blog. Read this book. It's not easy, like "Moby Dick" isn't easy. It's dense and it jumps around. Not that "Moby Dick" jumps around, that's not the point I'm making. I'm talking about density. Recursion is what the book is about. Recursion occurs in language, it occurs in mathematics and it's occurring throughout my blog. Among many things, Douglas Hofstadter talks about pictures that are only background, the dark areas, the perimeter that describes the object, or better, implies the image that ought to be the focus of the picture. That will be my voice, describing the boundary that contains whatever is within. You decide.

What do "The Big Lebowski" and the proposed content of my blog this week (Where Evil Grows) have in common? Kenny Rogers. Check out the beginning of this Poppy Family clip: that's Kenny, as in Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, before "Lucille", before "The Gambler" or "Islands in the Stream" or the chicken franchising, back when Kenny was an ersatz psychedelic, flower child. Savor that for a moment.

When you look carefully enough, there is one degree of separation between every thought that comes to your mind, which, to me, implies that we're receiving much more data than we consciously take in with our six senses. Or is it five senses?

So, "The Big Lebowski"". The bulk of the groovy segments of this Coen Brothers' piece are buttressed by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition rendering "I Just Dropped In". Kenny Rogers, psychedelic, sporting a Mitch Miller beard, striped pants and a white turtleneck. Did Kenny cop that look from Glen Campbell or David Clayton Thomas?

Here's my new working theory for life: everything is connected to everything else, but the closer you get to making the connection between things, the more connection you uncover. I'm going to stay out on the perimeter, sending pointillistic messages from the edge. If you stand back far enough, you'll see whatever you are supposed to see. No talk of the "Evil Empire" this week, go to nagyok.com for that. Read this post, go watch "The Big Lebowski" (Jeff Bridges is brilliant and John Goodman is John Goodman) and then got listen to "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks. Then go back and watch "Where Evil Grows" and ponder how Terry got derailed and where the Family is during that TV spot.

I am heading back to the cosmos to ponder what happens next (click on this link, please!).

Ken

Next: Obsessions with mortality and the blues jam!

It's technical jargon.

Technorati Profile

My balcony, my street

Let me first say, now that I have internet in my home, it will be waaaaaaaaaay easier to post. I could have paid for internet for a decade for what I've spent in internet cafes. And, I never felt quite comfortable doing this at work.

It's a little confusing having a Hungarian IP address: google comes up in Hungarian, even blogspot. Computers are smart: they always know where they are.

Here's Monday's post. It's a bit late, but expect better service from now on. No, demand it.

As a lad I knew it as Cafe Racing: men, and women I suppose, hurtling on two wheels at terrifying speed, cornering with their knees almost touching, but not quite, the asphalt. This is my street, Erzsébet Körut, but without the corners. Riders hurtle from stop light to stop light as fast as their racing bike can carry them - in first gear. I suppose if the bike they rode where the motorcyclic equivalent of a top fuel dragster, or even a Formula 1 racer (WARNING: turn down the volume before you click that last link), they might get the bike into second gear and still have time to brake. These riders assiduously observe traffic lights. Up and down the boulevard they speed and brake, brake and speed, going as fast as they can in 100 m before they must slam on the brakes. Imagine 100 m sprinters called back, yet again, for another false start, then you will capture the futility of this urban racing: Sisyphus would ride a 1000 cc Kawasaki Ninja AND play saxophone (see "Ode on A Parisian Saxophone").

So, allow me to put on my science teaching hat: why don't those bikes fall over in tight corners? A spinning wheel generates a torque and the faster the spin the stronger the torque. Did you ever try to tip over a spinning top? It's because of the torque the wheel generates that you can't easily tip it over. Imagine each wheel on the motorcycle as a spinning top and you'll understand why motorcycles are so stable when they are moving at high speed. Or maybe I got that wrong? I'll know for certain once I start teaching grade ten physics.

The correct response to last weeks (or two) survey: in English, bérletigazolvány, means "pass".

Thanks to everyone who has visited this blog. "kenikoop abroad" now rates a hit on google!!!

Viszlát!

Next week (no, for real): I stick my neck out with a tribute to American Imperialism and The Poppy Family with "Where Evil Grows".

And that is how we get from here to there

Day 4: I assured myself that Friday was the day I would emphatically declare "Budapesti vagyok!", which means "I am a Budapestian!" More precisely, I am a Pest (pronounce "Pesht"), as my residence is a fifth floor apartment on Erzsébet Körút. It's bloody hard to pronounce, as there is no English equivalent to the "zs" sound - it is a letter unto itself, one of 44! - but it's a combination between a j-sound and a z-sound. What matters, though only slightly, is that the name means "Elizabeth Boulevard" in Hungarian ... which the locals call by a completely different name, as they do their country: Magyar. It sounds like "Modjor" in English. The building, Erzsébet Körút, 41, is next door to the Corinthia Grand Hotel Royal, which is probably the swankiest hotel in town. And if you've been doing you research on this town, you know that it's pretty swanky! But, before spoiling the plot, let's start at the beginning. I was feeling a little helpless as I had only a book of ten transit tickets - one per leg of your trip, no transfers - and the transit police are most diligent, as I shall elaborate on further on in this post. I rose early and made my way to Moskva Tér (Moscow Square) to the main transit station on the Buda, or west. side and about 16 minutes by tram. I managed to negotiate the self-serve passport photo both, clawing at every bit of relief inside, trying to locate my photos or 700 Forint. It was pointed out to me by a very patient local, who spoke first in Hungarian, then English, that I needed to wait a little longer and they would appear in a slot OUTSIDE of the machine. And they did. The lady at the ticket booth was very helpful and I succeeded in getting my first monthly transit pass (see above), which was crucial because a ton of trams and subways figured in my immediate future. So, I waited at Moskva Tér for the real estate agent and the new sixth grade science teacher to show up so the three of us could resume our viewing of flats that were neither within the housing budget nor conveniently on the transit grid. I may not have made this known to any of you, but both of these figured hugely in my pre-arrival planning. After waiting 45 minutes at the appointed spot, I decided to forge on to my next appointed viewing, one that I had arranged from Canada over craigslist. I managed to find my house in Costa Rica on craigslist, and by gum, there's also a craigslist for Budapest. If you're headed abroad, first check to see if that destination has a craigslist website, trust me. Instead of boring you with details - and not finishing the post - I'll share some interesting linguistic discoveries. "Pályaudvar" means "station", as in "train station". Can you see the connection? Neither can I, but that's what's so charming about Finno-Ugric languages. "Estación" in Spanish, "station" in French, they're just too obvious. Heck, if you could read Hindi, I bet it would look and sound just like "station". Actually, and in all seriousness, I think this language sounds like Inuktitut, the Inuit language. Inuksuk (the stone signposts from the Arctic that look like little men made out of stone blocks) could be a Hungarian word. It sounds Hungarian. Kayak is probably Hungarian as well.

Thanks to those of you who took time to fill out the survey. Please take a moment to fill out this week's.

Sziastok

Next: my balcony (for real this time)

Victuals

Today was shopping day. I love eating out as much or more than anyone, but you can't really arrive in a place until you have provisioned yourself and this means a journey into an unknown realm. Touristic locales tend to be English friendly. Or, you can count on some English speakers in and around hostels, but I don't live in hostel country. I live in Magyar. So, I had to go to the local grocer and try my luck. The corporate logo for the local grocery bespeaks lumber: wood products from British Columbia, a tree in the shape of a triangle. In fact, I'm sure I'd seen the logo on the side of a BC Rail wood-chip car one time, but I might be confusing it with Canfor. Undeterred by their corporate branding, I sallied forth. Hungarian may be a phonetic language, but the words bear absolutely no resemblance to any word you have ever seen, unless you have traveled to Estonia, Finland or the Eastern slope of the Northern Ural Mountains of Siberia. Fortunately, this cereal box had "spelt flakes" on the side, but, ignoring that, you can see what I'm up against here (see above).

Packaging seems to be universal and every culture seems to put a picture of what's inside on the side of the bottle or box. I suppose this isn't an entirely safe proposition, as I'm sure somewhere gasoline comes in milk cartons with a sunflower depicted on the side. If you can open it without buying it, smell it. In fact, perhaps grocery stores cold have "smell testers", little bottles, previously opened, like in Lush, so you can sample the fragrance before forking over 1200 Forint (HUF). By the way, the Lush shop is four tram stops away and, surprisingly, you cannot smell it from my flat. One great boon living here is the beer, which comes in pint (or 500 mL) bottles. This size makes a lot of sense, to me at least, because that's how big the portions are in pubs. The problem with the North American, 355 mL bottle, or the more svelt 330 mL Euro-North American version, is this: one is not enough and two is too many. Or one is too many and twelve is not enough. I get these adages confused. I want to stress that I have not seen the 330 mL Euro-North American bottles here, which leads me to conclude that this is a clever marketing ploy, preying on our fear of larger portions and more calories, and a is a means of getting the same price for 25 mL less beer. I digress: because they're pint bottles, they don't come in a six pack. So, how do you manage to pack four bottles into your shopping basket, the small Little Red Riding Hood off to Grandmother's House type baskets, without them rolling around or crushing whatever they are leaning against? I realize now, the trick is to put them in the basket LAST. I must have packed and re-packed that basket five or six times. I'm sure it appeared to all the bemused Budapesten that this 40-something ex-pat had NEVER shopped in his life before! Unlike stores back home, this one was very small, having perhaps four aisles. So, it's virtually impossible to put your basket down to re-pack it without causing a serious shopper bottleneck.

And there I stop. It's been three weeks since I became an expert blogger and I've blogged twice! So, enjoy this random taste of Budapest and please fill in the survey.

Sziastok!

Ken

Next: my balcony

Ode On A Parisian Saxophone

Hiller had played it wrong. Somewhere between realizing his altruistic self and respecting his craft he had gone just too far down a narrow path, and, like a cod trap, the path just kept decreasing in diameter, foreshortening ahead of him. And there wasn’t enough room to get turned around. It’s times like these, he thought, that you have to be courageous to come out on the other end, or, more truthfully, you have to maintain a veneer of subscription to the heroic act, while secretly shitting your pants and furtively glimpsing at life’s map, wondering “where the fuck am I?” meanwhile supposing that in fact you should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

Hiller had laid down his tool years prior to first change himself so that, in turn, he could change the world. His great conceit was that he, in fact, was ruminating on his craft whilst changing himself, serving two masters and hastening himself closer to the cataract of egoic oblivion. He was certain his psychic world was flat and his mental perambulations of the past forty years had only reinforced this view. There was relief, but never quite lofty enough to glimpse the point at which he would have to leap to the other shore. Lofty enough only to delineate the circular horizon of what he believed he was capable. He pondered again his predicament. His relationship to his craft may change, but he would actually have to pick the tool up and try to use it again. What was now alien had once been a corporeal extension; it played him. Son-of-a-bitch.

Hiller listened intently for any tremor in the sound, cringing at the memory of the querulous tones he had made for so many years. Jesus! A single note: where was the core, where was the substance, where was the Creator? Now, it all sounded to him like one tedious sonic whinge and he simply could not stand it any longer. Somewhere on his path he had lost the beauty and he was now left to polish his profane bleat back into the halting prophecy he had once channeled. No Henry Higgins was going to polish this turd into something sublime, just Hiller. He thought he was losing his mind. Who thinks like this? He didn’t have time to sort it out, the psychosis of his impending mid-life crunch, because he had to remember how to hold the tool just so, that the truth would flow freely out and fill the air. He didn’t have time to think about the impossibility of it all, that art was a freight train, ever gaining momentum, and if you should falter trying to grasp a rung, your rung, to hoist yourself aboard, then you’d better drop your head and start sprinting for another try. Or stop.

Hiller picked up the saxophone, wet the reed and exhaled. He couldn’t do it. Not yet. He slumped in his chair, arms akimbo and saxophone balanced across his right thigh, just like his favorite photo of Hank Mobley. He contemplated another inhalation. Sisyphus would have played sax.

© 2008 Kenneth Hoffman

Where I live and where I teach

On Google Earth you can locate my house at

9º55'21.71" N, 84º13'04.71" W

and my classroom at

9º56'16.00" N, 84º10'48.75" W

That's me waving,

Ken

Hurricane Season

Note from Ken: I posted this 3 Sept/07 in my last, vain attempt to construct my former blog. One point: as a Canadian in Costa Rica, I receive an email every fall cautioning me about hurricanes.

Hola amigos!

I thought I would start my blog with an offering about hurricanes

Indeed, we were spared by hurricane Dean but it looks as though Felix will dump a lot of rain on Costa Rica, which I can assure you is a very wet place between the months of April and December. Paste the following link into your browser for the latest tracking information from the National Hurricane Center.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at1+shtml/205025.shtml?5day#contents

I suspect that central México will see buckets of rain. "Rain" in Spanish is lluvia (pronounced you-vee-ah) and "bucket", or more precisely "pitcher" is cantaro. This brings me to my favorite Spanish expression llueve a cantaros, which loosely translates as "raining buckets" or "raining cats and dog". I use this expression as much as I can. "Cat" in Spanish is gato and "dog" is perro. If the dog is a bitch, then it's a perra and if it's also small, you call it perrita. It's a bad time to be a small dog in Costa Rica.

For a country that receives so much rain, you'd think that Costa Rica would be a great place to by a good umbrella, cheap! Costa Rica is a great place to buy coffee, cheap, which you'd expect because so much of it grows here. You cannot buy a good umbrella, cheap or otherwise, in Costa Rica. I bought a fair umbrella once, but someone stole it when I was at a soccer game, which lends credence to my assessment of the Costa Rican umbrella industry. This will be the plot of my novel when I finally get around to writing it.

So, if you're coming to Costa Rica between April and December, bring a good umbrella, but keep your eye on it.

Next posting: Ark construction with native hardwoods

Fallen From the Sky

I have to remind myself that the driver of this bus loves his life as much as I mine. Perhaps more. And besides, no one wants to die on this Christmas Eve. There is too much joy and beauty in the eyes of the children this day, reflecting their blissful recess from school lessons or the longing that they had school lessons to recede from.

The driver is a madman, a demon, and his conductor a high-speed trapeze artist, dangling from the ladder to the roof of the bus, Technicolor baggage in one hand, his life in the other, delighting the passengers and distracting them from the diablo driving us, hurtling, into the ground from the highland sky at our backs. The ride is punishing, my organs and fascia rolfed back to youthful vitality by the seats of the erstwhile “Bluebird”. This bus may well have carried me to school-mandated swimming lessons.

We rocket past the roadside internment camps, scattering the bright-eyed inmates roadside, arms waving in frantic greeting and desperate plea to be taken from the Inter-Americana, anywhere. We couldn’t stop, not on Christmas Eve. For now, they must commend themselves back to the care of Frente Republicano Guatemalteco, back into the “blue fist”, sanguine and still warm from the killing. These people are too beautiful to live in this beautiful land.

The razor cut, in the rigors of pomade, the Alfred E. Newman ears, all lend an air of absurdity to the driver. In the rear-view mirror I face his upturned eyebrows, but not the mouth. I variously imagine the lips spread wide, Grinch-like, as we are conveyed, from on high to certain perdition below in Guatemala City. Or, stretched tight, dry, the lips are fixed in concentration on the correct balance of air, asbestos, gravity and friction. He is alien to me, as are the epicanthal folds and the burbling tongues that surround me that evoke an origin somewhere between Yupik and Athapaskan. These are the people who crossed the Bering Strait or landed from another star. They are gods and we are the extranjeros, the profane.

The chicos, capped with Nike and the gringos frocked with green-fatigued images of Ché, longing each for the other’s utopic myth, one the crisp, crystalline air of the highland, the other the climate control of a big-box mall. Sisters, a pair, beautifully strange and beatific, take the seat before mine. Priestesses of this outland, asserting their propriety in their bearing, regaled in the garish blues, purples, reds and pinks of their office, they banter openly a secret in a tongue 25,000 years old. My world has barely impinged upon them, a golden cross hanging about their necks and nothing more, until one reaches inside her tunic to answer her cell phone. The language has survived but the telepathy has not.

We stop for gas at the Esso station in Iximché, the “place of the maize tree”. The motor runs, sputters and then stops. The imp and the acrobat scramble to lay hands on the venerable Chev 350, V-8, that has carried us this far. Everyone says a silent prayer in his own tongue that we will be delivered safely and punctually to the city, most to family and me to the airport. Beneath the corporate branding, this place is sacred. These people resent being a tourist attraction. The high priestesses can’t bring down the placards promising “whiter whites” or effective representation, nor do they wish to topple the cell phone towers of Babel. The President of the United States too thought it necessary to pass this way only nine months ago. When they finish exorcising his profanity they will begin with mine.

© 2008 Kenneth Hoffman

What's Up?

Family and Friends:

I could never get my other Blog to work, so I've started another one. I will try to post regularly, providing some sort of insight into what I'm doing in Costa Rica and in life, in general.

To get things started I'm going to post something I wrote after traveling to the Guatemalan Highlands.

Ken