Wine and the Woowoo Code

My head hurts. And I've lost my watch.

The first is from drinking too much wine during and after dinner last night. The second was the result of failing to follow The Woowoo Code.

The conversation was engaging and no one really wanted to leave the table after it was cleared. Bottles of wine kept magically appearing and when I wasn't filling someone else's glass they were filling mine. Alan was telling George Plimpton stories - they had shared a few jungle adventures together and Plimpton was a notorious prankster - and the wine flowed like water. Red water. Plimpton, for those of you to whom the name rings no bells, was the author of "Paper Lion" and many other books. His schtick was to pretend he was a professional at some chosen endeavor and then see what happens. In "Paper Lion" he shows up at the Detroit Lions training camp and poses as a rookie quarterback. Other adventures includ being knocked out by Archie Moore while posing as a boxer, playing a heavy in a John Wayne western, and giving the trapeze a go during a circus gig. Alan told the tale of a heavily disguised with make-up Plimpton pretending to be a cobra salesman to a group of tourists in India. Good stuff, do go on, more wine please.

As for the watch, well, yesterday I failed to apologise to the coffee trees before hacking, chopping and sawing them down. This is a clear violation of The Woowoo Code, Woowoo Charly tells me and it's little wonder that sometime during the deforestation, a limb reached out and snatched the watch from my wrist. I don't know what I will have to do to atone for my lapse, but I'm sure it will have something to do with crystals, shiny stones and talking to the universe. I'm going to ask Woowoo Charly right after I ask her the time.

Just Writing To Keep the Keyboard And My Brain From Cramping Up

"Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake." W.C. Fields

I'm tempted to write about the weather this morning. Let me clarify. I don't mean this morning's weather, I mean writing about our weather in general...this morning. Fortunately, I am a man who is able to resist temptation, so you won't have to listen to me rant about the misnomer that is Bajareque, the "mountain mist." Or hear me say, "Mist my ass! It's sideways rain is what it is. And it's cold too." If you had had to listen to me say that, I would have pointed out that that was yesterday's weather while today the sun has made a successful comeback and is getting great reviews. (Note the clever use of "had had" and "that that." This clever phrasing is to literature what limburger is to cheese and Bush is to honesty.)(Stinks, stinks and stinks.)

The President of the U.S. was on the tube last night giving his annual lies about the State of the Union and what a swell job he's done. I heard not a word as I had first retired to our guest room with its back-up TV to watch the jungle parts of "King Kong" and then went off to bed to read until morpheus lowered my lids. What I did hear was Woowoo Charly talking back to the Prez and explaining to RTGFKAR what being said was BS and what was not. There was, apparently, very little of the latter. Great fun that. Much better than the post speech analyses by the designated hitters, I mean, pundits.

Apart from that slice of our life there was little else to make note of. I did interrupt our vigorous reading and laying about with an hour's worth of felling coffee trees. The aforementioned Bajareque discouraged further felling, so I returned to our cave to knock off a Times crossword puzzle. Well, almost anyway. The lack of knowledge re: foreign currencies tends to keep me at bay.

Today may prove more fruitful bloggingwise. There are workers and gardeners noise-ing about and we have a dinner party to attend at day's end. Catch me later.

A Quote By Any Other Name...

Spawn says I should start a blog with this quote: "Let not art such labor make that living beauty we forsake."

Okay, now I've done that.

It's a good quote as quotes go and a nice rhyme too. That "art such labor make" part is a little tricky, but I think I get the gist. If art's giving you trouble, dump it and find yourself a "living beauty." Living beauties, by the way, are always preferable to the other kind.

I like this quote from Benny Franklin: " In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria." A friend wrote and followed this with a study that shows that if you drink a liter of water a day, by the end of a year you will have consumed a kilo of e coli from feces. In other words, you are drinking poop. "Better" she says, "to drink wine and be a little stupid, than to drink water and be full of shit." Now that's a good quote.

I used to have a Bartlett's, but I left it behind when we departed The States. Bartlett's are great for inspiration and finding out "who said that." If I had one now I'd look up the author of Spawn's quote. If I had to guess though, I'd say Shakespeare, because old Willy popped off on about every subject known to man. I'm sure he wouldn't leave art untouched. Too bad he's not around today. He'd be a great blogger to follow.

"RTGFKAR oh RTGFKAR, where forth goeth thou RTGFKAR? Doth not thy travels Daveed include? In search of yon Pricesmart for beverage and food? And doth it not follow as the night follows day, that fair Charly of Woo in the garden doth play? And what of old Doak who sits still and small write-eth, doth not the dawn of a new thought excite-eth? These are the queries that shalt not be forsaken, lest the faithful abandon my sweet blog and read Bacon's."

Yup, Willy would be fun. Wish I could write like that.

Is Golf in the Offing?

Immaculate blue sky this morning. Looks like it was painted up there. Mountains are in such sharp relief I'd swear someone moved them closer. There is a breeze though, shaking the banana trees and rippling through the coffee. Makes the day perfect, I suppose, if you like breezes. I'm a still air man myself. If I want to feel air I'll move through it at a faster clip.

Woowoo Charly and RTGFKAR take their morning cuppa java out on the patio. They're out there now greeting the day. Hello day. Being the Last of the Great Indoorsmen and a Morning Person - a type universally avoided in the A.M. by those who are not - I'm compelled to get right to it. This morning's it is this blog.

Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the out-of-doors, golf, walking my dog and cocktailing with cigar in hand while saluting the setting sun from a comfortable chair at rest on lawn, patio or balcony comprise three of my favorite things to do, I just find dwelling in my cave with book, keyboard or remote in hand equally attractive endeavors which have the added advantage of being without weather. Ain't no breeze screwing with my golf ball in here.

Which brings me to today's topic. I can't see it from this, my office vista, but I know that over that rise obliquely to my left and then down the road a bit followed by a sharp right into a hidden valley is a golf course in a place called - wow what a coincidence - Hidden Valley. It's true, they use the Spanish Valle Escondido, but a hidden valley by any other name is still a hidden valley is what Shakespeare would have said if he hadn't stumbled on that rose thing. And it is there I long to go. There amidst the stately homes of the rich, the very rich and the heavily mortgaged lie nine beautifully appointed golf holes eager to accept my humble offerings of double bogies, bogies, a here and there par and an occasional birdie. There is a sound a golf ball makes as it rattles into the cup that I've nearly forgotten. It is a sound as pleasing as the last note of a grand symphony and one that is nowhere duplicated in nature. I must hear that sound anew anon or I fear it will be lost forever. In short I'm jonesing and I need a fix.

I'm busy today though. Maybe tomorrow.

Rambling

Alrighty then.

I have recently realized that no task great or small is beyond my capabilities despite my advancing age. That is, of course, if the task occurs above my knees. Anything below, forget it. Get some kid to do it.

In many Panamanian schools it is mandatory for children to learn two additional languages. The languages being? English and Mandarin. What do they know about the future that we don't?

Two members of our local policia motored up to our house yesterday on their Suzuki Trail Bikes. One of them was a woman. The other one - you might have guessed this -
was not. They were looking for a Juan Serracin. We told them there were Serracins all around us, arriba, abajo, a lado and that we knew Aurellio, two Albetos, a Margarita and a Daisy, a Roberto, a Dalys, a Jose a...at this point the policia began to laugh while we continued the list and ended with "but no Juan." No problema they said as they remounted and rode off, no problema. Got to wonder what Juan did.

While we were almorzando, lunching, at Amigos the other day we over heard this conversation: "Best thing to do when you meet new people is to get them drunk right away and figure them out." I think there may be some sense to this. Bad drunks, mean drunks, crazy drunks, stupid drunks and the like are all exhibiting parts of their personalities usually suppressed but nevertheless there. Might as well know about them right off the bat.

For me finishing a good book qualifies as "getting something done." "What did you do today?" I painted the garage, overhauled the car engine, plowed the back forty and prepared dinner for eight. You?" "I finished a good book."

My car battery died. Bought jumper cables and fired it up. Battery died again. Bought a new battery. Ran for a day. Died again. Car now parked at Car Guys. What do you think, alternator, voltage regulator, starter? All those things are spelled like this in both English and Spanish: $$$$$$$$$$$. I'm waiting for the call.

And that's all folks. Hasta Manana.

Morning Madness

...like a baby.
...like a log.
...like a hibernating bear.

And that being the case, I'm fresh as a daisy. Okay, I know what's implied by the baby/log/bear references, but what makes a daisy fresher than, say, a petunia? These are the questions that haunt the Monkeymind.

I started the morning with an hour or so of Yahoo news and sports. One headline intrigued me most and I hastened to pull it up. "UFO's sighted over Texas" with a subheading that read, "government says they were fighter jets." This was a video clip clearly begging to be viewed. I know what fighter jets look like after all, so I grocked that I could decide for myself what was tooling about in the skies over the Lone Star State. But nooooo, hold on there alien breath. My screen remained black until a message appeared saying, "this clip in currently unavailable." Why is that I wondered. Is the government trying to keep me from the truth again, "943 lies cited leading to Iraq war" was another featured headline, or was there merely some technical error keeping me from the video? This phenomena coupled with why daisies are fresh has my morning off to a puzzling start.

Arco Iris (who needs segues?) is the Spanish way of saying rainbow. Had one of those this morning too. Well, half anyway. It arched colorfully up from over there in the trees only to wink out abruptly in a suspicious looking cloud at about its highest point. I'm thinking the government had something to do with this mysterious disappearance as well. It's a little known and closely held secret that the U.S. has been conducting rainbow fire power tests with military applications for years. There will be no arco iris gaps in the U.S. arsenal if Bush can help it.

And what else? I've had an awful lot of coffee this morning which is better than a lot of awful coffee.

Yesterday we took a break from Home Improvement Do It Yourself 101 and motored over to Amigos Restaurant where we could sit Al Fresco and ourselves outside. We go there because Gus is welcome and they have excellent wings from both chicken and buffalo. Reeeeal small buffaloes. Woowoo Charly and RTGFKAR like the honey garlic chicken version and I opt for the spicy hot buffalo death chunks. My choice being predicated on the old axiom that says, a day without heartburn is like a day without a good kick in the groin. I mention this yesterday tidbit because I was out of things to say about this morning.

Tomorrow if I have the same problem I'll just make stuff up. (Never end a sentence with a preposition.)...I'll just up stuff make.

Missing My ZZZZ's

There are external stimuli galore to blog about, I suppose, If I'd a mind to, the weather, the always present beauty, the guy on the ladder painting our house trim, but I woke up this morning still tired from a bad night's sleep caused by all the lingering problems of a misspent youth, my achy knee, my moaning back, my hurtful hip and a raging case of ziti inspired heart burn leaving me now more introspective than outer directed. Just give me a moment to snap out of it.

It is a clear, sunny, slightly windy day and Volcan Baru looks as gorgeous and majestic as usual there across the valley. The guy painting the trim and wrapping up other small details from our punch list is named Hugo, silent H, and he's accompanied by his girlfriend who sits and reads religious texts while he works. Woowoo Charly and RTGFKAR are getting after some gardening projects and I've got some floor sanding to get to as soon as I finish this. In other words, a typical day is underway, albeit after a late start. (I didn't get up until nearly nine in an unsuccessful attempt to capture those hours lost in the middle of the night.)

I think I've mentioned before that I now find the quality of life is dependent on a good night's sleep. It wasn't always so. As a younger sot I could burn the candle at both ends and still have plenty of energy to dance in the middle of the day. Not so now, which is probably a good thing as - briefly noted above - I've already done enough damage to this old bod. It serves me well to get a solid eight.

But there I go back inside again. And it's not even funny. The Monkeymind is at a fatigue caused standstill.

Yesterday we learned from long overdue survey results, that most of our driveway is not actually on our property. No one seems to care at the moment as the property we are encroaching on is owned by a couple from India who live there and, we are told, do not plan to build here for years. Nevertheless, when news like this is in your head, ziti sauce is in your chest and your hip/back/knee announces its presence, Macbeth doth murder sleep.

A nap though, just might work.

Neat Freak

Okay, I admit it, I am a bit of a neat freak. I'm not into the everything must be spotlessly clean - I mean c'mon - the dog sleeps with us - but I do like a certain degree of order. I'm "a place for everything and everything in its place" kind of a guy. Part of this trait, I'm sure, was inherited - my mother being a neat as well as a clean freak - and part an acquired thing having to do first with attending military schools at a young age and later realizing that as a "7" if I don't put things where they belong, I won't be able to find them in the future, a circumstance which causes frustration to rear its ugly head and strike me in the wah. Wah, by the way, is a Japanese word meaning a place of peace and serenity. Its encroachment into English was first detected in the musical form called Doowah. If you sing DooWaaaahh, rising a bit on the second syllable and holding the note, you can feel the peacefulness inherent there. Disturbed wahs are not a good thing as you can also see in music. Dowahs sung too rapidly morph into doowops, an up tempo, less than serenity and more of a hurry up inducing form of music.

What I'm getting to, now that I've reached my BS goal for the day, is that yesterday we got our closet installed. It's large, you could hide in it, beautiful, it matches both our furniture and the dog, and it will hold piles of stuff. I say will hold, because I haven't got to actually filling it yet. I'm looking forward to that task as soon as I neatly wrap up this blog and put it away. My wah is downright giddy at the prospect. Let's see, jeans go over here, shirts over there, socks and shorts in this drawer and let's make sure all those jackets and other hanging stuff all face the same way. I'm thinking to the left.

Are you happy for me or do you just want to go mess something up?

Just thought I'd Mention It

We have a bird that lives off to our left in the tall trees that makes a noise eerily similar to the sound Hitchcock used in "Psycho" when stabbing his victims. Yeeeeeep yeeeeeep yeeeeeep yeeeeeep. Can you hear it?

I mention this because, well, I'm the kind of guy who mentions things and really, what would you know without guys like me? Would you know, for instance, that at this very moment I can see our dog Gus eating a fruit that is a cross between a banana and a plantain called, I think, a dominico? We set a bunch of these on a rock overlooking the coffee plants to our fore as bird enticers not dog food, but Gus who roams about untethered these days, likes to separate one from the bunch and carry it around awhile. This is, of course, normal dog behavior. Normal dog behavior being defined as anything that completely baffles moderately intelligent people. I for one, understand him completely.

And other things you wouldn't know unless I mentioned it include our living here in the new as yet unnamed casa for ten or twelve days - who's counting - sans electricity. And right there, in one sentence, I threw in words from English, Spanish and French. Makes me glad I had to attend a class or two on my way to practice. We did have the use of a small generator that weighed more than an offensive lineman and made a sound louder than your grandpa snoring that we fired up sparingly. We found that candles and lanterns induced a more pleasant ambiance. Ambiance, by the way, is also a french word unless you pronounce it am-bee-ants, in which case, well, I'm so sorry. I could wax poetic about our adventures during the blackout if I knew what waxing poetic meant - I missed that class - but I will go on about friends and neighbors Lonnie and Barry, I mean Bonnie and Larry, who fed us frequently, listened to our gripeing and only used the cattle prod on me once to move me from the sofa in front of the football game. Thanks B and L and also muchas gracias, merci beaucoup and danka come back Shane.

Now that electricity has been granted us by the powers that be and Julio who throws the switches, we are all happy as clams which is a cliche - wow more French - that I choose to use because, c'mon, what's happier than a clam? Certainly not that damn Anthony Perkins bird. Yeeeeeep yeeeeeep yeeeeeep yeeeeeep.

I'm hoping it's migratory.

Back in the Saddle

Now I sit me down to blog, I pray my muse my brain unclog.
If I should lie it's no mistake, I pray my muse it funny make.


A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, "hey buddy, why the long face?" This is one of my favorite jokes which gives you an indication why some people suspect that behind my ancient exterior lies the mind of a ten year old. (They could be right.) Why this comes to that fourth grade mind is that a horse walked up our driveway - a rock and dirt swath cut through the jungle leading to our house - last night at roughly the middle of that night; middle of the night being defined as any time one is awakened unexpectedly in the dark. Gus, of course, barked. Here I have to mention that apart from the fridge periodically dropping newly minted cubes into a bin our new concrete and steel house makes no internal noises. It is a very quiet house. There are only the wind, distant dogs and roosters who don't understand the grand scheme of things to listen to in the night. When Gus began to bark into this sound vacuum it had about the same effect that a bowling ball striking the pins would have during a moment of silent prayer. It was loud, very loud. Even the horse thought it was loud. Following Gus'lead "I leaped from my bed to see what was the matter" and was rewarded with a glimpse of the steed retracing his steps down the drive. He was riderless, a thing I found somehow comforting. I mean I don't need mysterious horseman galloping about the premises while we are trying to catch our zzzzz's. After explaining to RTGFKAR, who had also been roused, that it was just a horse, "A horse?" I flicked off the lights and went back to bed to await the dawn, a part of the day which comes much too soon. Or at least it seems so today.

The blog barrier now officially fallen, the Monkeymind rests. Or wants to. Trouble is, there are these men outside, sawing, drilling, hammering and generally disturbing my wah as they finish off some external house trim projects. Ah well, tonight is another night. Maybe there will be no animal tales to relate. Did I tell you about the stray huskie the night before the horse? No? Okay, maybe tomorrow.