A mother's tale...

Very rarely do we get to share the joys of creation. If I ever pass an eight-pound piece of jelly-covered flesh through my loins, I hope my experience is one of love, and caring, and horses.

http://flickr.com/photos/violentz/sets/273157/

View it as a slideshow--the way it was meant to be seen.

The water washes all.

My pasty skin leaves ghostly impressions in the moonlight. Naked, I stand next to a basin of murky water. I know there is a bucket, though I cannot see it. I grope for it and dunk it into the water. Quick, Lamaze breaths prepare me for the cold rush I know will come next. It hits me fast, the water, and at that moment not even the sixteen hours I have been on my feet could make me tired. But the second rush is pleasant and I remember holding a man’s head still and watching his life leak onto my skin, his friend’s face mangled and chewed by glass and steel, still clutching the Salva Vida beer can. Salva Vida, life saver. Gallows humor, I suppose. I’m conditioned. The third rush flushes it away again and I hear children of the village giggle as they watch me bathe; they want to know if I am white everywhere—if perhaps my skin was bleached by the sun. Two women approach and shoo them away. They, too, have come to wash and we silently pass the bucket back and forth. All I see is the illusory glaze of eyes. All I hear are our shared gasps as the water hits us again, and again.

Would you like to join me for some Vermox and warm milk?

There is a slightly superstitious saying that there are only two ways to get rid of worms in your body: one, to open your mouth next to a bowl of warm milk and wait for them to crawl out and into the bath; or two, which I might add is a far more scientific approach, to take una tableta de Vermox dos veces al día por tres días. Given that the milk in Honduras is just as toxic as the worms, Vermox has become the preferred method of medicinal magic throughout the country.

But a lesser-known worm—the bot larvae—frequents their moist, mosquito coasts and does not abide by these rules of eviction. They have only to bite you and the process begins. You could be walking, working in the garden, blinking your eyes in the sun, or sleeping, with your mouth open. Once inside the flesh, they burrow two anal hooks to secure their location. Barely visible but for a small hole and spiracle, the larva grows until your skin looks like it is trying to push lemons through its pores. There are four ways to take care of this little devil: one, to use the acrid white sap of the matatorsalo, but that leaves the little corpse floating just under your skin; two, to smear a generous slathering of Vaseline over the air hole and watch the maggot squirm out of your flesh, gasping for air; three, to glue that baby shut and squeeze the suffocated worm out the next day like a popped zit. Or you could leave it, let it feast on your DNA like a tiny fetus; witness the joys of this transmogrificational experience.

Or, if you are very lucky, you will just happen to be on a medical mission with a full staff of doctors who can pull the son-of-a-bitch out without leaving random body parts or anal hooks burrowed in your skin. They will pull it out alive and thrusting against the forceps. ¡Felicitaciones! They will put it in a jar for you so you can name him Lester, and he will join you for dinner—fresh Vermox in milk.


I couldn't resist:

....yeah, that's what it looks like.

Food for thought

Pizza:
Pizza Slut
Little Seizures
Papa Schlong
Domi-hos

Taco:
Taco Hell

Burgers:
Booger King
McDon'ts
Arsleez
Dairy Queeze or
Dairy Queef
Fart-ees

Chicken:
Freaky Fried Chicken
or Kentucky Die Chicken
or (as Marta says) Kentucky Fucky Chicken
Pus-eyes

Subs:
Blimpee pee or
Blimpoo


more to come....

Bulgaria welcomes you.

The train is freezing and all I have to keep me warm is a slightly damp bath towel. I’m curled into myself, horizontal on a train seat cushion that I’m afraid to let my skin touch. I blink, hoping my eyes will adjust faster so I won’t lose sight of my luggage on the rack. My camera is my pillow. I wish painfully for sleep, but it seems less likely as the train jerks to a stop.


The door to my compartment yanks open and I jolt up. Three men enter and sit purposefully around me. I move closer to the window and straighten my affairs, my clothes, my hair. The sun still hides behind the mountains, but the tell-tale blue of morning sky frames the rolling peaks. I am awake as the man across from me begins to ask me questions. I shake my head and say simply, “English.” He smiles a spaced grin and hands me a gallon of beer in a plastic bottle. I check my watch. 4:30 seems a good time to start drinking. I take a long swig and let the stale suds of Bulgarian beer settle on my taste buds. The men approve. Between the four of us there is almost enough language ability to say hello. It doesn’t seem to matter because we’re sharing warm beer for breakfast. They descend from the train to work the mines; I guard the beer and greet the sun.

That’s a beautiful poem; now get the hell away from me.

I’m reading Dante’s Inferno and you hand me your poem consisting of the single line, “Amanda is hot” and you ask me if I get it? Well, gee wilikers, TJ, I’m stumped. It wasn’t enough that I had to hear the guitar renderings of a complete stranger for the last three hours, or that you always manage to run your dirty fingers through your grease-slicked hair before you try to touch me. “Amanda is hot.” Well, you wrote that so beautifully I wish you would write a song next.

I was kidding, TJ, not that that would cross your mind. I’m suddenly far more interested in talking with the convict, still in penitentiary orange, sitting just a little ways in front of me. Perhaps he killed someone.

“Ladies first,” he had said to me earlier, probably to check out the first hairless ass he’d seen in ten to fifteen, but at this point it seems flattering.

Please sing something else, like “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” If I head to the front of the bus, you’ll surely follow me; and any further back, and I’ll be sitting on the urine-drizzled commode. I guess there’re only eight more hours anyway. So “Amanda is hot,” and “Danty was a pretty cool guy,” and “Greyhound sucks.”

Is he grabbing my ass? I think he’s grabbing my ass!

Wow. I mean, wow! This guy’s good. I’ve been on this metro for nearly twenty minutes and I’m just now noticing? I should have seen it coming—the way he darted to the seat next to mine when there were plenty of other spaces. I didn’t even feel it right away; good timing with the vibrations of the tracks, my subtle friend. So tricky. So sly. No, surely I am mistaken.

Nope! That’s his hand. On my ass. With his finger moving just enough in a “tisk tisk” motion. Oh yeah, it’s definitely there. Ooo, didn’t time that turn just right, now did you my man? This is intriguing. Do I say something, or just get off at the Villiers stop and wait to catch the next metro, or just get off at my stop and pretend nothing happened, or just ask him if he wants me to get him off all the way? This is ridiculous. And sick. And….funny. Sad times in pervert land. But damn he’s good. I have never been so impressed by a mindless act of perversion. I didn’t feel a thing, but there he is shaking his leg, and rubbing his unoccupied palm on his knee, and thinking dirty French thoughts about how he’s getting away with it.

Perhaps I should say something. But then again, he’s the best groper I’ve ever encountered. Damn, what’s more twisted, this dude, or my thought process. Wow. Stealth man, I salute you!

I love you, but stop calling me

Nothing personal, and nothing directed towards one specific person, or two, but stop calling me at all hours of the night and day. First off, if you know me at all, you know I hate the phone. I find it a terrible, impersonal extension that people hide behind in an attempt to avoid human contact and to shelter their emotional fragility. How many times have we called someone to ascertain feelings or ask for a date instead of asking him or her in person? It's so much easier to deal with rejection over the phone because it is so impersonal, and nine times out of ten, we're checking ourselves out in the mirror as we're talking (or performing some other perfunctory task such as checking email or watching TV, so it isn't as if we are truly invested in the conversation anyway). I much prefer e-mail or IM, not because I am under some funky form of disillusionment in which I believe these forms of communication are far more personal--because they are, in fact, more impersonal--but that they at least do not pass themselves off as personal through the disguise of a familiar voice.

Second, I am no longer in college. Chances are highly likely now, that at 3:00am, I am not working on a paper, or at a party, but in my bed, hopefully asleep. I know I used to pride myself on the fact that no matter what time people called me, I was ALWAYS awake, but now that novelty has worn off. I recognize that many of you are in different parts of the country or world, and the time zone doesn’t really occur to you, and I do enjoy hearing about your escapades, but next time you are laughing at the funny man on stilts at a protest, please check your watch and do some basic math to see if perhaps I will be conscious to hear of such events. It’s not that I don’t love you, or even that I hate the phone, but that I’m working very hard to fix this insomnia thing and it becomes very difficult to hook-up with that Sand Man character if you are calling me every five minutes. Sending love from my bed (and not in that way you perves).