Tao de Guate

People are getting married. There's a whole world that spins and breathes like a fantastic jungle cat. It has teeth. Stories are woven, paranoia grows, outrage swells, life continues. Undoubtedly things are getting harder, less sure, more frightening. The economy rocks like a tugboat in an oceanic storm, where black skies lift waves as high as tenements and the only light comes from cracks of lightning.

All this is happening somewhere.

I miss the cities of my life. The people I have known have grown into different people and nothing calls to me in a voice I any longer recognize. Only the rain on the laminent roof bears any resemblence to the content of my heart, which of course, I only remember because it drowns out the sounds of whispered business in the next room over as I write, feet above my hips, thoughts on the shape of my spine.

The substance of my skin may as well be mist, as the cells of my bones have grown bound into chess pieces, like the feet of China's last generation of concubines. I'm learning Go. I'm learning how to build things like Go boards and romantic surprises for those interred with me in this happy wayhouse of obscurity. This afternoon I brewed my first batch of Kahlua. It's now for sale at the bar as a midrange liqueur - $3 a shot, which is pricy in the Guatemalan highlands.

I teach yoga now, apparently, though this morning I gave my class to myself and a small band of mosquitoes. They had trouble with their half-pigeons, but they will improve. Here, we all have nothing but time to improve.

My blood runs thin as the passage of time, puffs of Domingo's finest additive-free leaf, and conversations with anyone and everyone who checks in for the night - so long as they're up for backgammon, cornhole, or bumper pool. In our spare hours, we make intricate playlists for the guests to eat dinner to. I think the goal is to inscribe them with all the subtlety and insinuation of a Flaubert novel.

I forget to send letters that I promised I would send a month ago. There's just too much time to remember.

Sometimes I dream of going home, but that prospect seems as much a dream as staying, so I just let thoughts and visions come and go like the dreams that they are. Pretty soon I'm going to have to make a 13 x 13 Go board, so, obviously, that's the priority.

My companion in mischief, Crunchie Cannonball Leebojusnik (pronounced "lee-bo-JUS-nik"), who is a cat with a constantly oozing wound on his neck, stalks from room to room looking for misplaced avocados for to wrestle and, hopefully, defeat. I leave him to stalk in peace.

Leelee is in Chicago. Her absence lends some creedence to the possibility of a life that once was and may one day exist again. Afterall, people are getting married - the supernatural call of return resounds. The United States lurks in shadow like the mole people of Manhattan beneath this, my waking life.

Sometimes guests come and bring their strange ambitions with them. They want to know where I went to school, what I studied, what my career goals are in the future. I find these people very difficult to sit near, as I find mosquitos, coffee flies, fire ants, and ocassionally, Crunchie Cannonball Leebojusnik, difficult to sit near. They bring a kind of creeping panic about becoming as a type of malicious gift that I prefer not to accept. After all, what now remains to become?

There was Kahlua to be made. I made it. It is now for sale. This is the substance of my breath, my blood, and my bones. The rain comes. The rain goes. Somewhere far away, people I once loved are getting married, and in the name of that love, I am happy to go to kiss their cheeks and offer my blessings (which are probably about as valuable to them as Elida's knife-weilding threats to serve me for lunch one of these days...that is to say, highly valuable).

There is a kind of muted joy in the vaudeville. Harried travelers want to know how long we have been here, how long we will stay. I want to know if they will play chess with me, or backgammon, or Go.

I'm in tropical Snow Country, writing substance with heartbeats as frail and miraculous as the hummingbirds and butterflies, as hard as Papillon, as mischievious as Marisol, as alive as anything I can possibly put my finger on.