>This is gonna bore the shit out of most of you. No “Richie and I had an orgy with 3 Nica girls and two midgets” stories here. Just my thoughts and no photos and it’s pretty drab for anyone who doesn’t care about me a lot or gave birth to me. But I feel much better with the words floating around on e-paper and not stuck inside my head.
Plus it was 5 girls, not 3.
And it was donkeys, not midgets.
When we hit the border from Costa Rica I thought “Oh Shit,” or that’s what I would have thought if the sea of hawkers and sellers and con-men had given me a moment to think. We walked through this mess and somehow found our way onto a hot-as-shit bus and somehow made it to San Juan Del Sur.
San Juan Del Sur is the best place on earth. Google image search it if you do not trust me. A wordsmith I am not so I can’t do justice to the place but I will try.
The people are quaint and nice and lazy as all hell. If sitting and watching life was…. you know how the analogy goes. But there are also people out moving ALL THE TIME, walking or observing or dancing or playing soccer on the low tide showing beach until the water rises and overtakes them and they change from soccer to a weird game of water polo meets volleyball. The town is small but the tourists make it bustle and the colors, oh man the colors are wild. Inspired by Toucans {I just made that up} every house is the hue of a child’s dreams and what would be tawdry and gaudy back home is utterly beautiful here. As houses change owners, turquoise makes way to purple to bright pink to electric blue and so forth with the the trims all clashing neon colors and the sidewalk lined with mosaic or painted by a blind man. Gay people everywhere run for your fashioncentric lives. Anyway it rules.
One thing I love about travel is that it is a vacation away from myself and I often remember things that otherwise would have been buried.
I’m sitting on the beach drinking $1 vodka with Richard and the Franuaks {french-canadians} and we are staring at a black sky full of brilliant stars. I remember this:
I remember being young in DC with my family and a man with a telescope is promising a view of Saturn for a fee. My Dad pays, to my delight, and I look through the lens with excitement, except Saturn is just a flat monochromatic shape, a poorly drawn character of the version in my head and this, I believe, is my first lesson in mystery and anticipation being better than the real thing.
I remember a meteor shower, viewed alone on the beach at Tybee Island. The sky is unmolested by florescent light out in the secluded Georgia swamp and the stars burn their full intensity. They fall, long tails of silver, they fall and fall and it is the most amazing thing I have ever seen but I am hardly watching. I’m looking at the people around me, people with lovers and friends to share this with and I so desire to share this with someone, a friend or lover, but I have neither. By now the entire sky is plummeting, a magnificent silver rain, and I may never again see such beauty but I pray to never again feel such pain and loneliness.
At midnight Sophie and I don our undies and charge into the ocean. I run with a full faced grin and collapse in the cool black water. The water is immense and engulfing and waves come from nowhere to explode upon us and they rip my boxers from my hips.
After a while we get out but pause to stare at the stars and I see one fall. With it I wish that everyone I know could be in this black water and be blissfully unaware of their lives and responsibilities, like a huge mental baptism, and only be aware of this moment and this feeling and all of us.
Some days I buy a beer and walk a few minutes to sit on the beach. Some days I study in the hammock or watch soccer with my host family. One day I drink too much Rum and too many beers and watch the Day of the Father party with fireworks exploding around us and a wild mesmerizing dance with costumes flowing like water and kids dressed like skeletons. I make a fool of myself and can’t remember walking home but thats where I wake up.
On my birthday we go to a rodeo and the scene is unreal. People pack like sardines into the stadium or bleachers or wood planks in a circle and cars park around that, their hoods and roofs occupied with people straining to see. We get there as a young man is being taken to the hospital, for the point of this rodeo is to fill the ring with any drunken soul who wishes and after the rider falls these people aggravate and taunt the bull and run from it and often get trampled. The people love it, I love it and brass band blares and we watch men in the ring fight and wonder, like the bulls must wonder, if making men into fools is really what we love to see.
That night I forgo going out, I just feel content to stay in, alone with my thoughts. My thoughts lay upon themselves for me to sift through and examine and I do so with great curiosity and enjoyment.
I think of my father, of the joy he must’ve felt this day 24 years ago in holding me. Yet, just over a year later, he would feel great pain with the lose of his own father and he would bear this burden everyday from then on. I have never known him without his shoulders taught and stressed and I wonder what he was like before they were. My dad is a strong man -the strongest man- and yet I’ve always been acutely aware of his struggle and with enough patience and observation you can see this in many men. I’ve yet to meet my own burden but I wish to be strong enough to hold it, or better, hurl it far from me so that I may stand unbridled and tall.
I think of the sadness I feel when looking at old photos of myself. I feel this because though I retain some of my thoughts and memories the person is as strange to me as a historical figure you study in the sense that I will never meet them. IN many ways, the person in the photo, me, is dead. And now I know so much about what I become and so little about what I was; I know I didn’t dream or love seeing a lovers silhouetted breast as she turns to put on a shirt, as not to completely depart with modesty, but she does so cavalierly and without care that you watch, nor did I dream of the Nicaraguan coast, looking longingly at the boats and the endless sea beyond them, rather sledding with my brother and frogs and massive forts and Santa and uncontrollable restless excitement on Christmas Eve. But Santa was a farce and I now drift easily asleep on tranquil and forgettable Christmas Eves.
In search of something I view my face in the mirror. Lines form around my eyes and brow, like water worn rocks, beaten by the sun and perpetual friction. Hair sprouts on my poched skin and out my nose and only the hair on my head, standing alert at its awkward length, resembles the me of 24 years prior. And I find it laughable and interesting that I’m not even close to the same person and I will not again be this person and I go to bed.
By now the man or boy, 20-years old, we saw carried away from the rodeo has died and his family has found a burden to bear. And it has nothing to do with me, death is as an everyday, everyminute fact of life and it{s for this fact that I feel such an immense sadness and longing for yet another man, and myself, and my young father and his father, that I will never meet. I sleep soundly and the next day play baseball in a shit covered cow pasture with 40 eager and excited Nicaraguans, their passion for the game so alive in their playing and like always the day will end and another will begin I am excited and ready to see what it may hold.
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